Woodrow Wilson

The Wartime Leadership of Woodrow Wilson (Vanity Fair Magazine, 1918)

There are various reasons for Woodrow Wilson’s present preëminence. For one thing he represented, for years, the rights, under International Law, of the nations which were not in the war, and whatever his private opinions may have been as to an attitude of strict legality….Then, further, he is at the head of a nation which had no selfish motives in coming in. America wants for herself no new territory, no new spheres of influence. France wants Alsace and Lorraine. Italy wants ‘Italia Irridenta’. England, though she declared war to save France from being overrun through losing the channel ports, has gained incidentally all German Africa and the German islands of the South Seas…


Click here to read a 1913 article about Woodrow Wilson’s Under Secretary of the Navy: Franklin Delano Roosevelt…

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Colonel House: His Right Hand Man (Time Magazine, 1923)

What Harry Hopkins was to FDR, Edward Mandell House (1858 – 1938) was to Woodrow Wilson (1856 – 1924) – senior advisor and close confidant. When this article was on the newsstands Wilson had been out of the White House for three years, yet House was still seen as a shrewd observer of the political landscape. In this piece from Time Magazine, we gat to read about some of his doings during the Post-W.W. I era.

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Wilson On The Eve of War (Pic Magazine, 1942)

This article remembers the relationship Wilson enjoyed with a much admired editor and columnist for the N.Y. World, Frank Cobb (1869 – 1923). A page from the newspaperman’s diary recalls his 1917 visit with the President on the night before he appeared before Congress seeking the declaration of war.

I’d never seen him so worn down. He looked as if he hadn’t slept – and he said he hadn’t…

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President Wilson’s War Cabinet Convenes (Review of Reviews, 1922)

Franklin Knight Lane (1864 – 1921) recalled his service as President Wilson’s Secretary of the Interior and the eventful year of 1917 when Wilson lead the U.S. into it’s first European war. Some may be amused as he reminiscences about the time Army Chief of Staff General Tasker H. Bliss (1853 – 1930) fell asleep during one of the cabinet meetings.

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The Life of Woodrow Wilson (Current Opinion, 1925)

Here is a 1925 review of William Allen White’s (1868 – 1944) biography Woodrow Wilson: the Man, his Times and his Task:

Whether or not Woodrow Wilson will live as a world figure depends not so much upon what work he has done as upon what the chance of time and circumstance will do with his work. He must live or die in world fame bound upon the League of Nations. If that stands he may tower beside it…If the League crumbles, then Wilson will become one of the host of good men who spent their zeal striving for futile things.


An article about Wilson’s reluctance to go to war can be read here…


Click here to read a list of Wilson’s Fourteen Points for the Versilles Treaty.

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Woodrow Wilson on the War and the Peace (from his Speeches)

Here are two selected quotes from two speeches by President Wilson; the first one one is from his war speech before Congress (April 2, 1917) in which he explained why the defeat of Germany would be best for the Unites States. The other quote is excerpted from a speech he made three months earlier in which he reasoned as to why a fair peace treaty was vital in maintaining peace:

…It must be a peace without victory… Only a peace between equals can last. Only a peace the very principle of which is equality and a common participation in a common benefit. The right state of mind, the right feeling between nations, is as necessary for a lasting peace as is the just settlement of vexed questions of territory or of racial and national allegiance…


Click here to read a simple list of Wilson’s 14 Points.

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Farewell Woodrow Wilson (Vanity Fair Magazine, 1921)

Celebrated columnist Walter Lippmann (1889 – 1974) wrote this piece to mark the end of the Wilson administration (1912 – 1920) and usher-in that of Warren G. Harding (1865 – 1923).

Unlike the ink-slingers in ages to come, Lippmann had pleasant remarks to make regarding his presidency:

And I firmly believe that the historian who examines the state papers of Wilson up to November, 1918, will say, not only that they are in an unbroken line from Washington’s Farewell Address, but that it required something very like genius under the pressure and in the fog of a world war, to keep that line intact.


Click here to read about a dream that President Lincoln had, a dream that anticipated his violent death.


Read a 1951 profile of a future First Lady: the young Nancy Reagan.

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