Woodrow Wilson was widely admired throughout the twentieth century. Surveys of scholars often included him among the higher ranks of presidents. Many of his critics acknowledged his administration as among the most consequential in our history.
In the early twenty-first century Wilson’s star has been in eclipse. His positions on race and gender issues have been highlighted for their jarring discordance from those of our time. Some conservatives see him as uniquely culpable for the subsequent development and overreach of the administrative apparatus and war powers of our national government.
His name has been removed from the public affairs school at Princeton University, an institution that he led into its modern form.
Has the dismissal of Woodrow Wilson gone too far? As with Thomas Jefferson, can we acknowledge his faults and limitations while learning from his visionary insights and seeking to achieve his ideals?
No one is better placed to explore these issues than John M. Cooper, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has dedicated his illustrious career to illuminating Wilson and his era. While Cooper is an admirer of our twenty-eighth president, he’s clear-eyed about his flaws and missteps.
Cooper is perhaps best known to the public as the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, acclaimed as the definitive one-volume account of Wilson's wide-ranging life and work.
In this episode of the Serve to Lead podcast, Cooper discusses Wilson's historical legacy and reputation—and makes the case for its actionable relevance in our time of accelerating change.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
“THIS MAN'S MIND AND SPIRIT”
Each year, in the morning on December 28, a military honor guard carrying the American flag presents a wreath that bears the words “The President.” Accompanying the honor guard are members of the clergy, who carry a cross and say a prayer. The clergy are present because the wreathlaying ceremony takes place in front of a tomb in the Washington National Cathedral. Since the day is only a week after the winter solstice, the low angle of the morning sun causes bright colors from the stained glass windows to play across the floor of the alcove where the tomb is located, over the stone sarcophagus, and on the words carved on the walls. The alcove contains two flags, the Stars and Stripes and the orange and black–shielded ensign of Princeton University. The wreath laying takes place on the birthday, and at the final resting place, of the thirteenth president of Princeton and twenty-eighth president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson.
The ceremony and the tomb capture much about this man. The military presence is fitting because Wilson led the nation through World War I. The religious setting is equally fitting because no president impressed people more strongly as a man of faith than Wilson did. His resting place makes him the only president buried inside a church and the only one buried in Washington. The university flag attests to his career in higher education before he entered public life. Wilson remains the only professional academic and the only holder of the Ph.D. degree to become president. The inscriptions on the alcove walls come from his speeches as president and afterward. Wilson made words central to all that he did as a scholar, teacher, educational administrator, and political leader; he was the next to last president to write his own speeches. No other president has combined such varied and divergent elements of learning, eloquence, religion, and war.
In 1927, three years after Wilson’s death, Winston Churchill declared, “Writing with every sense of respect, it seems no exaggeration to pronounce that the action of the United States with its repercussions on the history of the world depended, during the awful period of Armageddon, on the workings of this man’s mind and spirit to the exclusion of every other factor; and that he played a part in the fate of nations incomparably more direct and personal than any other man.” Churchill was referring to the part that Wilson played in World War I and above all, his decision in 1917 to intervene on the side of the Allies. That was the biggest decision Wilson ever made, and much of what has happened in the world since then has flowed from that decision. Unlike the other American wars of the last century, this one came neither in response to a direct attack on the nation’s soil, as with World War II and Pearl Harbor and the attacks of September 11, nor as a war of choice, as with the Gulf War and the Iraq War, nor as a smaller episode in a grand global struggle, as with the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Many have argued that the United States joined the Allies in 1917 because great underlying forces and interests involving money, ties of blood and culture, and threats to security and cherished values were “really” at work. Perhaps so, perhaps not, but one incontrovertible fact remains: the United States entered World War I because Woodrow Wilson decided to take the country in.
Professor Cooper's books include:
The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt
Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900-1920
Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations
Image: Wilson Center
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