The idea of writing a biography of Woodrow Wilson grew out of my longstanding interest in World War I and a conversation with Alice Mayhew, my editor at Simon & Schuster. I originally imagined that I would focus on Wilson as commander in chief, but Alice encouraged me to follow the trail wherever it led. It forked while I was looking at the index of Presidential Greatness by the historian Thomas A. Bailey. To my surprise, Wilson took up more space than any other major president. I soon understood why: he was the most controversial of the lot because his triumphs as well as his defeats were so large and lasting.
Struck by the intensity of the praise and condemnation that Wilson has aroused since his first days in the White House, I wanted to know the cause. Was it the dissonance between his old-fashioned social ideas and his modern notions of what government should do? Was it the era, with its constant clash between the status quo and the progressive push for reform? Several possibilities came to mind, but for me, the one that stood out was a personal quality—his great sense of moral responsibility. While admirers have treated it as a virtue and a political asset, critics have often seen it as arrogance. Both camps agree that morality was a conspicuous feature of his character and a hallmark of his presidency. And both say that it left an unusually big mark on the country and the world.
The depth of Wilson’s moral concern is almost always traced to the fact that he was the son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers. The precepts of the Judeo-Christian tradition did permeate his boyhood, and he remained a devout Christian all his life. But he was not a zealot. Nor did he claim to know God’s will. His religion was a largely private matter, a source of comfort in the face of adversity and unfathomable events.
Ultimately I came to see the moral ideals of President Wilson as more secular than religious, the effect of his long formal education in history, government, and law. As Professor Wilson (of Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan, and Princeton), he lectured and wrote extensively on government. Democracy was a frequent theme, and his faith in democracy ran as deep as his faith in God. Because democracy rests on the consent of the governed, he thought it the most moral form of government, and like many Americans before and since, he believed that the success of the American democratic experiment made the United States a morally superior nation. Wilson also believed in the power of “moral force,” by which he meant the power of ideas and actions aligned with commonly accepted moral principles. In his judgment, the greatest power of the United States was not its wealth but the moral force of its democracy.
In Wilson’s first term, his moral sensitivity served him and the country well. He persuaded Congress to enact a substantial program of economic reform by arguing that his course was morally right and that doing the right thing would pay off politically and materially. In short order he won the creation of the Federal Reserve Board, the income tax, the Federal Trade Commission, and an antitrust law designed to prevent monopoly.
No previous president and only two of his successors (Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson) compiled legislative records as impressive as Wilson’s. But moral force was not the only force in play. The reforms were long overdue, his party controlled both houses of Congress, and two persuasive members of his cabinet lobbied unceasingly for his demands. Yet I think it fair to say that the moral force of Wilson’s case mattered. Set forth in a series of speeches, it won broad public support for his legislative agenda and made it difficult for Congress to oppose him without sounding morally deficient.
I found these moral victories significant for another reason: they were purchased in an immoral bargain. Southerners in Congress saw that Wilson’s reforms would bring a wholesale expansion of federal power, and federal power was anathema to men who used states’ rights to justify laws that made second-class citizens of African Americans. The Southern bloc agreed to support Wilson’s economic reforms in exchange for segregation of the civil service.
The bargain was made by the same two cabinet secretaries who worked Capitol Hill. Wilson acquiesced and, I discovered, he paid a personal price. Denounced by African Americans and others who voted for him on the strength of his promise of equal justice, he was so upset that he took to his bed for days. He knew the segregation was morally indefensible, but ending it would have cost him the votes of every Southerner in Congress. The injustice lasted for decades, as Southern Democrats in Congress forced one president after another into bargains that preserved racially discriminatory state laws. It also exposed a hazard of claiming the moral high ground: when an outspokenly high-minded leader fails to meet his own standards, he is seen as a hypocrite.
Wilson’s preoccupation with morality also figured prominently in his conduct of foreign relations. Early in World War I, he justified U.S. neutrality not on grounds of national interest but as a noble response to a senseless war. And he presented himself as uniquely qualified to broker a peace because the United States was the only major power unstained by the slaughter. Both sides found his condescension insufferable.
In 1917, when U.S. neutrality was no longer tenable, Wilson grounded his call for a declaration of war in another noble idea: “The world must be made safe for democracy.” Although the thought stirred souls on both sides of the Atlantic, it was profoundly distressing to Americans who objected to fighting Europe’s quarrels and those who opposed war on principle. New espionage and sedition laws sent protestors to jail in record numbers. The stifling of dissent raised another question for my investigation: what happens when two moral visions collide? Wilson sometimes resisted the hard line taken by his attorney general and postmaster general in dealing with antiwar protest, but he let virtually all of their decisions stand. As a result, he has gone into history as the president whose administration outdid all others in prosecuting dissent.
When the war ended, in November 1918, President Wilson had just lost his majorities in both houses of Congress, and as he struggled with the new opposition, his righteousness hardened into a self-righteousness that compromised his political judgment. By ignoring advice to appoint an influential Republican to the American Commission to Negotiate Peace, he alienated virtually every Republican in the Senate. At the Paris Peace Conference, his demands for a moderate settlement irked the Allies, who were intent on making Germany pay for the war and preventing it from rebuilding its army and navy. Britain’s prime minister, David Lloyd George, complained about Wilson’s “sermonettes” and his sense of himself as the only morally upright statesman in the group of four who set the peace terms.
Wilson’s greatest triumph in Paris was the creation of the League of Nations, the first global organization committed to the preservation of peace. He also persuaded the Allies to moderate some of their demands, but the terms of the treaty signed at Versailles were generally punitive, and the authors came in for no end of blame when Germany launched World War II. Wilson had tried, but moral suasion was not enough; it rarely is when stakes are high.
Home from Paris, Wilson found himself in the fight of his life over the ratification of the treaty. Three months in, he suffered a stroke that permanently paralyzed his left side and forced him to the sidelines. Republicans were willing to ratify a treaty with reservations, but Wilson refused all pleas for compromise. While some historians have blamed his intransigence on his illness, I side with those who have pointed out that his obstinacy was nothing new. An exasperated Henry Cabot Lodge, leader of the Republican drive for reservations, rose in the Senate to remind the country that “We too have our ideals, even if we differ from those who have tried to establish a monopoly of idealism.” The Senate defeated the treaty three times. The lesson was lost on Wilson, who had persuaded himself that his was the only position with moral force. He came to believe that he had erred, but only in proposing the League before his fellow Americans were ready for it.
Woodrow Wilson felt most alive when he was waging a moral war. What follows is a story of battles won and lost by moral force, of exhilaration and dread on the high road, of great tenacity undercut by willfulness and spite. An author does not know what a reader will take away from a book, but I hope that this one—the story of a president who succeeded and failed by hewing to his moral convictions—will start a serious conversation about the possibilities and the complexities of moral leadership in a fractured world. Faced with a crisis, Wilson often asked himself, “What ought we to do?” I cannot think of a better place for the conversation to begin.