Woodrow Wilson

By Alfred Steinberg

Few members of the Wilson family expected young Thomas Woodrow to go into politics. It was unthinkable to them that he could do anything but follow the family tradition and go straight into the Presbyterian ministry, as his father and grandfather had done before him. Certainly nothing in his early life hinted that Wilson was Presidential timber—and yet he kept insisting that he intended to become President.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson followed his aim with a single-minded determination that is rare. He grew up in Staunton, Virginia, attended Princeton University, and then, observing that many Presidents enter the White House via the law, took a law degree from the University of Virginia. After languishing in Atlanta for several years with an unsuccessful practice, Wilson charted a new course, and decided to enter politics through the teaching field. Following a short stint at the newly formed Bryn Mawr College and Wesleyan University, he was made professor of jurisprudence and political economy at Princeton. There he remained for twenty-two years, seemingly entrenched in the academic atmosphere. He produced several brilliantly written books and articles, but his political career seemed farther away than ever.

Suddenly, in 1902, Wilson was named president of Princeton, and startled New Jersey political circles by completely overhauling the entire university, both intellectually and socially. Events moved at a rapid pace; Wilson was elected Governor of New Jersey in 1910, and in 1913, twenty-eighth President of the United States.

Citizens of this country saw their new President develop from a militant neutralist to an internationalist, his new beliefs culminating in the League of Nations; from a strong pacifist to a man who bowed to the necessity of declaring war against Germany. He was an intellectual who took decisive action when the occasion warranted and who, above all, fought for his own beliefs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Papamoa Press
• Release date: Jun 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787204713

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Text originally published in 1961 under the same title.

© Papamoa Press 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

WOODROW WILSON

BY

ALFRED STEINBERG

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

Chapter 1 — A COVENANTER 4

Chapter 2 — EARLY YEARS 8

Chapter 3 — THE STUDENT 14

Chapter 4 — YOUNG MAN OF THE LAW 20

Chapter 5 — THE ACADEMIC LIFE 28

Chapter 6 — BRYN MAWR AND WESLEYAN 33

Chapter 7 — PRINCETON’S PROFESSOR WILSON 38

Chapter 8 — PRESIDENT WILSON...OF PRINCETON 45

Chapter 9 — A NEW KIND OF GOVERNOR 52

Chapter 10 — WINNING THE PRESIDENCY 58

Chapter 11 — THE NEW FREEDOM 66

Chapter 12 — THE WORLD OUTSIDE 74

Chapter 13 — WAR AND NEUTRALITY 78

Chapter 14 — THE COMING OF WAR 84

Chapter 15 — WINNING THE WAR 92

Chapter 16 — LOSING THE PEACE 98

Chapter 17 — THE FAILURE THAT TRIUMPHED 108

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 110

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 111

Chapter 1 — A COVENANTER

ON September 3, 1919, a long train pulled out of Washington, D. C., on a special mission. President Woodrow Wilson, the father of the League of Nations, was embarking on a cross-country tour to stir the American people into bringing pressure on their Senators to approve his handiwork. Years of hard work had gone into his brain child, and he was at the point of exhaustion as the train headed toward Ohio. I know I am at the end of my tether, he admitted to his secretary. But the trip is necessary to save the Treaty. If the Senate rejected the idea of an association of nations to preserve the peace, it would break the heart of the world. Even though in my condition, it may mean the giving up of my life, I will gladly make the sacrifice to save the Treaty.

The trip started off well. Gaunt and with his face deeply lined, he seemed to gather strength from the response of his audiences. Great crowds collected at Columbus, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City and Des Moines to listen to his plea for their support for his Covenant of the League of Nations. From his train platform, he called out: I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it!

His train steamed on to Nebraska, into Minnesota, across the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho and into the State of Washington. Then he headed south into California, and eastward to Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, Denver and Pueblo. He spoke from his heart, without prepared written speeches—rousing words calling for an end to American isolationism from the rest of the world. Save the Treaty and the League, he implored his listeners.

It was at Pueblo that his dream was shattered. In the midst of his talk, his voice failed him momentarily and he was barely able to continue. That night as the train rumbled eastward toward Kansas, his sacrifice became personal. His rigorous tour had taxed his weakened body beyond endurance. The world’s leader awoke to find he had suffered a stroke that left his left leg and arm paralyzed and his exhausted face rigid. Even then, he implored his doctor not to call off his crusade. I must keep on, he insisted. Don’t you see that if you cancel this trip, the Treaty will be lost? Wisely, his doctor did not listen to him.

Wilson’s League of Nations failed to win the approval of the United States Senate. However, his sacrifice was not in vain. For his ideal sank into the hearts of several young men of that time who would one day become their nation’s leaders. One of them, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, revived Wilson’s dream during World War II and called it the United Nations. Another, President Harry S. Truman, won the United States Senate’s approval for the UN. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who sought to strengthen the United Nations, said of Wilson: He understood the necessity of the United States’ exercising leadership in working for a world in which the rights of individuals and of individual peoples would be respected. The establishment of such a world order was to him an essential part of the establishment of a lasting peace. From the grave, Woodrow Wilson had won his cause.

All through his lifetime, Woodrow Wilson fought for causes in the same fashion that he fought for the League of Nations. He sprang from a family background of deep religious and moral training, and this revealed itself in his continual efforts to improve his own character and that of mankind. The Woodrow side of the family was strewn with outstanding Presbyterian ministers and thinkers, active in Scotland and later in the United States. Wilson once said: My ancestors were troublesome Scotchmen, and among them were some of that famous group known as Covenanters.

These were unbending Scotchmen of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who fought for religious and political freedom in the face of harsh persecution. They derived their vigor and courage from their belief that their first duty was toward God and not to a government they opposed, and that nothing must interfere with this. In the end, the Woodrow and other Scottish clans prevailed and the English and Scottish Parliaments agreed, in 1643, to their Solemn League and Covenant. Woodrow Wilson was to use the same words in his 1919 effort.

The Wilson side of the family was Scotch-Irish. A historian once referred to those Scotchmen who lived in North Ireland as pugnacious and masterful, single-minded, conscientious and obstinate. This would set them close to the Woodrows. However, there did exist one chief difference. While the Woodrows were invariably somber and stern and filled with a determined sense of duty, the Wilsons had a sense of humor that often broke through this heavy cloud. Woodrow Wilson once confessed that a constant struggle raged within him between the Woodrow and the Wilson blood strains. On one occasion when he was President, a Cabinet member suggested that he lay aside his work for a few hours and join him in some fun.

My boss won’t let me, said Wilson.

Your boss? came the puzzled reply.

My conscience, Wilson explained. It drives me to do what seems my duty. It frowns on temptation.

Yet he composed gay limericks and lost his voice shouting at football games.

Both the Woodrows and the Wilsons migrated to the United States early in the nineteenth century. Grandfather James Wilson came off the boat at Philadelphia at the age of twenty, in 1807. Aboard the ship was Anne Adams, whom he married a year later. He found a job setting type and working as a reporter on a paper owned by a close friend of Thomas Jefferson. When the War of 1812 ended, he moved to Ohio where he became a successful newspaper publisher and politician. Judge Wilson, as he was popularly called, was a crusading editor who could render opponents helpless by ridicule. His grandson was to have this same trait. On one occasion, for instance, Judge Wilson completely dissolved a politician’s argument that he should be supported for office because he was born in Ohio. The judge’s comment was: So was my dog Towser.

The Wilsons had ten children. The youngest and the seventh son was Joseph Ruggles Wilson, who was born in 1822. The Wilsons were a team and all the boys were put to work setting type as soon as they learned to spell. Early, Judge Wilson became aware that Joseph was the most scholarly of his children and he made a special effort to give him a full education. At Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, the tall, strikingly handsome youth graduated first in his class. He taught a few years at Mercer Academy and then felt a strong desire to become a Presbyterian minister. This led him to a theological seminary and then to Princeton, where he led his class and won his degree as a Bachelor of Divinity.

Before he started his long career as one of the nation’s leading churchmen, Joseph Wilson went home to teach at the Steubenville Academy. He was raking leaves one afternoon in his father’s yard when a girl walking by stopped momentarily, and their eyes met over the garden wall. She was Janet Woodrow—called Jessie by her friends—and she was destined to be his bride not much later.

Jessie Woodrow, who would become Woodrow Wilson’s mother, had migrated to the United States in 1836, at the age of seven, with her seven brothers and sisters and her patents. She was almost lost at sea when a heavy storm pounded her ship. Fortunately, she was holding a rope when a wave threw her over the rail and into the Atlantic. Before her mother’s cry of despair subsided, another wave washed her back aboard.

By the time Jessie Woodrow married Joseph Wilson in 1849, her father, the Reverend Thomas Woodrow, was already among the most eminent Presbyterian ministers in the United States, just as he had been in Scotland. He was a short, stocky man renowned both for his eloquence and his scholarship. With his strong Scottish accent, which he never lost, he later played an important role in his grandson’s development.

The young Wilsons did not immediately take on a pastorate. After their marriage, they went to Jefferson College where he stayed two years as a professor of rhetoric. Next they remained four years at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, where he taught chemistry and natural sciences. It was not until 1855 that they moved to Staunton, Virginia, with their two daughters, Marion and Anne. Dr. Wilson accepted the pastorate of the First Presbyterian Church there.

Staunton, which was a thriving community of 5,000, lay in the Shenandoah Valley encircled by mountains. A century earlier the steady surge of pioneers had come through here across the Big Trail toward the Cumberland Gap. This was a place of independent citizens known as the Valley People. One of their peculiarities was that they provided their ministers with a handsome manse, or residence, but paid them little in cash. Dr. Wilson’s manse was an impressive three-story, white-columned brick house, but his clothes were soon threadbare. One day a church member took him to task for his shabby appearance. Your horse looks fine, Dr. Wilson, he told him frankly. Much better than you do.

Quite so, sir, Dr. Wilson replied. I take care of. my horse, but my parishioners take care of me.

In 1856 came another national election and James Buchanan, the Democratic candidate, defeated John C. Fremont, the first Republican candidate. There was continuing trouble that year in Kansas between the proslavery forces and the abolitionists. The nation was moving toward the house divided, though war was still some years away. Dr. Wilson was too busy teaching the Presbyterian truths to concern himself to any extent with the black political clouds hovering above. Moreover, his wife was expecting her third child.

During the night of December 28, he opened the family Bible in his upstairs study and wrote in a firm hand that Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born at 12¾ o’clock. (The Thomas was not to be dropped until twenty-five years later.) Then he walked out onto the upstairs porch and in the darkness uttered a long prayer for his new son.

Shortly afterward, Jessie Woodrow Wilson wrote in a letter, He is just as fat as he can be. You may be sure, Joseph is very proud of his fine little son—though he used to say daughters were so much sweeter than sons.

When the Reverend Thomas Woodrow first looked at his new grandson, his comment was: That baby is dignified enough to be Moderator of the General Assembly!

Both parents and grandfather were certain that the new little Covenanter would one day carry on the tradition of the Presbyterian ministry.

Chapter 2 — EARLY YEARS

IN 1857, when Tommy Wilson was only a year old, Dr. Wilson moved his family from Virginia to Augusta, Georgia, where he became pastor of the First Presbyterian Church. In 1860 came another national election and this time Abraham Lincoln was elected President. Augusta, in the heart of the slave belt, now lay enveloped in secession talk and boastful calls for war with the Union.

Even little children heard such talk wherever they went, and some wondered what it meant. My first recollection, Tommy Wilson later said, is of standing at my father’s gateway in Augusta, Georgia, when I was four years old, and hearing someone pass and say that Mr. Lincoln was elected and there was to be war. Catching the intense tones of his excited voice, I remember running in to ask my father what it meant.

By now, Dr. Wilson had emerged as a strong believer in secession, even though he was raised in the North. Caught up in the raging controversy, he threw in his lot with his adopted section of the country. His views were in sharp contrast to those of his own family, for two of his brothers were soon generals on the Union side. Augusta had a white population of 10,000 and when war came in April of 1861, 2,000 young and old men marched off to answer the Confederate call. The large Army arsenal in the town worked overtime to produce much of the ammunition for General Robert E. Lee’s forces. Other war factories sprang up and the sleepy plantation area became a vital center of the South’s industrial strength.

During the early war years, Tommy Wilson was too young to understand what was going on. But by the time the war ended, the memory of its horror had made such an impression that it remained with him the rest of his life. Tommy’s father served as a Confederate chaplain in Augusta. In the early period of the fighting, he ended services one Sabbath and ordered his congregation to hurry to the ammunition factory to turn out supplies for the Army. Later on, his church was transformed into a military hospital filled with painfully wounded young men. Outside, the wide churchyard was transformed into a prison camp where frightened and tattered Union Army captives huddled before Confederate guards. Tommy and his little cousin, Jessie Bones, often slipped into the prisoners’ compound to talk to the prisoners. They did so until Jessie’s mother told them they must not go there again because these were the hated Yankees. Tommy, who didn’t understand, talked about converting the Yankees into Presbyterians. It was his strange notion then that all good people were Presbyterians, while all bad people were Yankees.

In 1864, he watched the city pitched into gloom because General William Tecumseh Sherman was marching through Georgia. Townspeople feared he would destroy the entire city by setting it ablaze. Hopeful that he might have a trace of decency in his soul, they busied themselves hauling their great stores of cotton bales into the center of the streets. If he burned the cotton, which was their wealth, they hoped that he might spare their homes. Sherman’s Army approached, but at the last minute bypassed Augusta entirely.

As the fortunes of war turned against the South, a cake of soap came to cost $25 in Augusta and food grew scarce. Tommy remembered soup made of field weeds, before the War finally came to an end. One sad day in May, 1865, he stood alongside his crestfallen father and watched silently as the captured Confederate President, Jefferson Davis, came