Woodrow Wilson
U.S. President 1913-1921, wartime President and Versailles negotiator (1856-1924)
Also known as: Wilson, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, President Wilson
Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) was 28th President of the United States, 1913-1921. Under him the Federal Reserve was created (1913), the United States entered the First World War (April 1917), the Versailles peace was negotiated, and the League of Nations was attempted. Quigley treats Wilson as the figure under whom the United States inflected from peripheral republic to global power, working through Colonel House and 'The Inquiry' to formulate the Fourteen Points and the framework of the Versailles settlement.
Election of 1912
Wilson was elected as a Democrat in 1912, taking advantage of the split inside the Republican Party between Theodore Roosevelt's Progressives and William Howard Taft's regulars. Quigley summarizes: 'the Republican Party was split between the followers of Theodore Roosevelt and those of William Howard Taft, so that the combined forces of the liberal East and the agrarian West were able to capture the Presidency under Woodrow Wilson in 1912. Wilson roused a good deal of popular enthusiasm with his talk of "New Freedom" and the rights of the underdog, but his program amounted to little more than an attempt to establish on a Federal basis those reforms which agrarian and labor [had pushed]' (T&H 89).
The submarine crisis and entry into the war
Wilson's first-term foreign policy was dominated by the German submarine campaign and American demands for unrestricted neutral commerce. Quigley records the 4 May 1916 'Sussex Pledge' moment: 'Germany sent Wilson a note on May 4, 1916, in which it promised that "in the future merchant vessels within and without the war zone shall not be sunk without warning and without safeguarding human lives, unless these ships attempt to escape or offer resistance"' (T&H 264). When Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917, Wilson took the United States to war in April. By the autumn of 1918 the German General Staff was sending peace approaches directly to Wilson: 'On October 5th a German note to President Wilson asked for an armistice on the basis of the Fourteen Points of January 8, 1918' (T&H 266).
Fourteen Points and Versailles
Wilson's Fourteen Points speech (8 January 1918) and his subsequent four principles (September 1918) became the German understanding of the basis for the Armistice and the Treaty. Quigley reads the Armistice negotiation as the moment of greatest American leverage and notes that Wilson then squandered it: 'Wilson made it clear that he would grant an armistice only if Germany would withdraw from all occupied territory, make an end to submarine attacks, accept the Fourteen Points, establish a responsible government, and accept terms which would preserve' the Allied military advantage (T&H 267). 'In these negotiations Wilson had clearly promised that the peace treaty with' Germany would conform to the Fourteen Points (T&H 268). The negotiations at Versailles departed from them substantially, producing what Quigley treats as the central failure of the post-war settlement and a key source of subsequent German revisionism.
Quigley's framing
Quigley treats Wilson as the human inflection point of American emergence into world-power status, but is critical of Wilson's procedural approach to the peace. He records that the The Milner Group 'accepted Wilson's identification of his war aims with his war slogans ("a world safe for democracy," "a war to end wars," "a war to end Prussianism," "self-determination," etc.) as meaning what they meant by "the rule of law." They accepted his Fourteen Points' (AAE 193) — but only as long as the Points served the underlying Anglo-American restructuring of Europe. After Wilson's 1919 stroke and the Senate's rejection of the League, the American institutional architecture of the inter-war period was built by the new Council on Foreign Relations that House's Inquiry team had organized.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 89 Quigley
the combined forces of the liberal East and the agrarian West were able to capture the Presidency under Woodrow Wilson in 1912. Wilson roused a good deal of popular enthusiasm with his talk of 'New Freedom' and the rights of the underdog.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 264 Quigley
Germany sent Wilson a note on May 4, 1916, in which it promised that 'in the future merchant vessels within and without the war zone shall not be sunk without warning and without safeguarding human lives.'
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 266 Quigley
On October 5th a German note to President Wilson asked for an armistice on the basis of the Fourteen Points of January 8, 1918, and his subsequent principles of September 27, 1918.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 268 Quigley
The negotiations with Wilson leading up to the Armistice of 1918 are of great significance, since they formed one of the chief factors in subsequent German resentment at the Treaty of Versailles. In these negotiations Wilson had clearly promised that the peace treaty with Germany would conform to the Fourteen Points.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 193 Quigley
They accepted Wilson's identification of his war aims with his war slogans ('a world safe for democracy,' 'a war to end wars,' 'a war to end Prussianism,' 'self-determination,' etc.) as meaning what they meant by 'the rule of law.'
- book-reviews · p. 36 Quigley
the 'Big Lie' that the 'Cold War' began in 1917, when the world was offered a choice between Wilson and Lenin, with all history since that crucial date being portrayed as a struggle between the outlooks of these two basically aberrant figures.