Civic Literacy Curriculum

Background

Woodrow Wilson had been a college professor, president of Princeton University, and Democratic Governor of New Jersey, as well as a leading progressive intellectual. The scholarly Wilson long argued that the American constitutional order, as the framers understood it, was old-fashioned and wrongly prioritized the restraint of power over efficiency, and that America would improve if its politics more closely resembled a British parliamentary system. The progressive Wilson similarly believed that a more professional bureaucracy would be able to offer more expertise in policymaking than the traditional American republic had previously offered. As such, he sought to displace what he saw as the complicated system of checks and balances with a much stronger presidency, but one which critics argued set the stage for an imperial presidency.

Among the major domestic changes during Wilson’s presidency were his work with Republican Senator Nelson Aldrich to create the Federal Reserve in 1913, which aimed to stabilize currency. Wilson also continued the era’s bipartisan skepticism of business monopolies. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act, passed in 1890, was designed to curtail monopolies, but weaknesses in the Act had become apparent in subsequent decades.  Supermajorities of Congress, with Wilson’s signature, strengthened enforcement by passing the Federal Trade Commission and Clayton Anti-Trust Act, both in 1914. As the only Democrat elected president between 1892 and 1932, Wilson also oversaw his party’s long-sought reduction of the tariff, with the 16th Amendment’s recent authorization of a federal income tax offsetting the revenue loss. 

Wilson’s other major change in American domestic politics concerned race relations. The Virginia-born Wilson had strong southern sympathies—praising both the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan while criticizing Reconstruction—and thus used his control of the federal executive branch to re-segregate the federal government. He also fired most of the high-ranking black appointees picked by Presidents Roosevelt and Taft.
World War I broke out in Europe early during Wilson’s presidency. Wilson had wanted to avoid American involvement in the war, instead preferring to focus on his efforts to remake the American government in line with his progressive political views. However, German sinking of American civilian ships and an effort to convince Mexico to attack America in exchange for recapturing the Southwest forced his hand. 

While these provocations convinced almost all Americans of the need for war, many of the ensuing actions President Wilson took during World War I proved controversial. For example, his government aggressively prosecuted critics of the war, arguing freedom of speech did not protect such opposition. Wilson also sought to use the victory in the war to remake the world political order, as he explained in his famous “Fourteen Points” speech. Two of his key goals were redrawing European boundaries to allow ethnic communities to govern themselves (though this was not to be applied to colonies or imperial holdings), and creating a League of Nations that would settle disputes and deter war. But fears that such a League would compromise American constitutional freedom and frequently pull the country into other countries’ wars led to the United States’ ultimate refusal to join the League.

Wilson, especially after his incapacitation after a stroke, proved intransigent in negotiating with the Senate. A group of hardline isolationists called the “irreconcilables,” mostly the most progressive wing of both parties, refused to sign any treaty. (This was ironic, as many of these senators were often Wilson’s allies on other issues.) Senate Republican leader Henry Cabot Lodge (MA) sought a compromise in which America would sign with reservations that would protect its sovereignty-- a guarantee that America would not automatically be pulled into foreign wars without its consent. (In other words, Congress would sign the treaty, but have to declare war to enforce it). The ailing Wilson rejected this, and the United States did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles or join the League.