20 Century

Created 1/24/1997
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Woodrow Wilson

Thomas Woodrow Wilson. Born 1856. Died 1924. Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in history in 1886. Professor at Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan, and Princeton until 1902; from 1902 to 1910 president of Princeton University.

He was elected governor of New Jersey in 1910 as a reform progressive, and pushed through the legislature an employers' liability act and a primary election act. He was elected president in 1912 when William Haft and Theodore Roosevelt split the Republican vote, and reelected president in 1916.

He delivered his State of the Union address to congress in person as no president since Washington had done, establishing a tradition that has lasted to thi sday.

Wilson's presidency saw tariff reform and reduction; the first federal income tax; the establishment of the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve; the establishment of the Federal Trade Commission; the extension of antitrust laws with the Clayton Ac, which also prohibited the use of legal injunctions to break strikes in labor disputes; passage of the Workman's Compensation Act, the Eight-Hour Railway Wage Act, and the Federal Child Labor Act; and the passage of three constitutional amendments: direct popular election of senators (17th), prohibition of alcohol (18th), and women's suffrage (19th).

On January 31, 1917, the German government announced that its submarines would sink all ships in the waters around Great Britain. This resort to unrestricted submarine warfare led Wilson to ask on April 2 for a declaration of war against Germany, which was voted April 6. Wilson's war government saw substantial government control of the economy--the War Industries Board to control production, rationing of fuel and food, and regulation of railroads and telecommunications.

His "Fourteen Points" to guide post-war peacemaking were widely praised. And his proposal for a "League of Nations" to guarantee collective security was accepted at the Versailles peace conference. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919. The U.S. senate, however, refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. Suffered a crippling stroke at the end of 1919.

Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points:

1. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind, but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in public view.
2. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of international covenants.
3. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.
4. Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.
5. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.
6. The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations in the world in obtaining for her an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under instittuions of her own choosing; and, more than a welcome, assistance also of every kind that she may need and may herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months ahead will be the acid test of their good will, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy.
7. Belgium, the whole world must agree, must be evacuated and restored, without any attempt to limit the sovereignty which she enjoys in common with all other free nations. No other single act will serve as this will serve to restore confidence among the nations in the laws which they have themselves set and determined for the govenrment of their relations with one another. Without this healing act the whole structure and validity of international law is forever impaired.
8. All French territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored, and the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be righted, in order that peace may once more be made secure in the interest of all.
9. A readjustment of the frontier of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.
10. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, shuld be accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous development.
11. Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro should be evacuated; occupied territories restored; Serbia accorded free and secure access to the sea; and the relations of the several Balkan states to one another determined by friendly counsel along historically established lines of allegiance and nationality; and international guarantees of the political and economic independence and territorial integrity of the several Balkan states should be entered into.
12. The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development, and the Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a free passage to the ships and commerece of all nations under international guarantees.
13. An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.
14. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.

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20 Century

Created 1/24/1997
Go to Brad DeLong's Home Page

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