WILSON, WOODROW. – President of the United States of America, born on 28 December 1856 at Staunton (Virginia), died on 3 February 1924 at Washington.
The son of a Presbyterian minister, he spent the years of his childhood and youth in the South (Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina), where he witnessed the horrors of the Civil War, which left an indelible mark on his spirit. In 1875 he entered Princeton «College» (New Jersey). From that time onward he displayed a pronounced interest in the study of political questions. In 1882 he settled in Atlanta (Georgia) as a lawyer, but the legal profession was not suited to him, and the following year he abandoned it in order to enrol at John Hopkins University, where he furthered his studies in political science. In 1885 he published the work Congressional Government, a highly successful analysis of legislative power in the United States, containing perceptive observations and criticisms of the shortcomings of American parliamentary practice. Having graduated in philosophy in 1886, he taught history and political economy at Bryn Mawr College and Wesleyan University and, finally, in 1890, was appointed to a chair at Princeton. From 1902 to 1910 he was president of that University and substantially modified its teaching methods and programmes. In 1910 the Democratic Party offered him the candidacy for governor of the State of New Jersey. Elected on 8 November, he promoted several important measures, including a law against electoral fraud and legislative provisions in favour of workers disabled on the job. In 1912, after 45 inconclusive ballots, he was nominated by the Democratic Party Convention as candidate for the Presidency of the United States. The division of the Republican Party into two factions (on one side Theodore Roosevelt, on the other the party’s official candidate, the outgoing president William H. Taft) favoured the election of W., who, with less than half of the popular vote, succeeded in securing 435 of the 531 electoral votes. He was also re-elected in 1916 and remained in office until January 1921, when he was succeeded by the Republican Harding. A pacifist, W. perceived the danger to world peace posed by the coexistence of the two blocs of the Triple Alliance and the Anglo-Franco-Russian Entente and, strengthened in this conviction by Colonel House, his friend, who played a major role in shaping United States foreign policy in those years, attempted to secure world peace through an agreement between the two rival groups of powers. He therefore sent House to Europe in the late spring of 1914, but the latter’s proposals, although accepted in principle by Germany and England, produced no positive result. When the World War broke out, W. endeavoured to keep America neutral, but Germany’s indiscriminate submarine warfare led to United States intervention on the side of the Entente in April 1917. W. responded evasively to the papal note of 1 August 1917 calling upon the belligerents to make peace, wrongly regarding it as favourable to German militarism. On 8 January 1918, in a speech before Congress, he set out in fourteen points the peace programme for an armistice with the Central Powers: abolition of secret diplomacy; freedom of the seas; removal of economic barriers among the nations; reduction of armaments; solution of the colonial question; Russia’s return to the international community after the restoration of the Tsar; independence of Belgium; reconstitution of France’s territorial integrity and the return of Alsace-Lorraine; the delimitation of ethnic frontiers for Italy; autonomous development for the nationalities of the Habsburg Empire; recognition of national rights in the Balkans, and access to the sea for Serbia; protection of minorities in Turkey; independence of Poland; and the establishment of a League of Nations. The fourteen points contributed to the Central Empires’ laying down their arms in November 1918. In the subsequent peace negotiations in Paris, however, W. did not display the energy necessary to oppose the nationalist and chauvinist aspirations of the victorious powers. He did, instead, succeed in launching the League of Nations. Upon returning to his homeland, W. encountered the hostility of part of the American Senate, which did not intend to approve the full text of the Covenant of the League of Nations. The opponents were not in the majority, but they prevented the attainment of the two-thirds quorum necessary for approval. The United States would therefore not be part of the League. W. suffered a collapse in September 1919, at the end of his presidential term, and lived in seclusion in Washington until his death.