Wilson, Woodrow

WILSON, WOODROW. - President of the United States of America, b. 28 Dec. 1856 at Staunton (Virginia), d. 3 Feb. 1924 at Washington.

The son of a Presbyterian minister, he spent the years of his childhood and youth in the South (Georgia, North and South Carolina), where he was a witness to the horrors of the Civil War, which left an indelible mark on his soul. In 1875 he entered the College of Princeton (New Jersey). Even then he nourished a marked interest in the study of political questions. In 1882 he settled in Atlanta (Georgia) as a lawyer, but the legal profession was not made for him and the following year he abandoned it to enroll at Johns Hopkins University, where he perfected himself in the study of political science. In 1885 he published the work Congressional Government, a highly successful analysis of the legislative power in the United States, with well-judged observations and criticisms of the drawbacks of American parliamentary practice. Having earned his doctorate in philosophy in 1886, he taught history and political economy at Bryn Mawr College, at Wesleyan University and finally, in 1890, obtained a chair at Princeton. From 1902 to 1910 he was president of that University and substantially altered its teaching methods and programs. In 1910 the Democratic party offered him the candidacy for governor of the State of New Jersey. Elected on 8 Nov., he promoted several important measures, among them a law against electoral fraud and legislative provisions in favor of workers disabled on the job. In 1912 he was nominated, after 45 ballots that remained without result, by the Democratic party Convention as candidate for the Presidency of the United States. The division of the Republican party into two branches (Theodore Roosevelt on one side, and on the other the party's official candidate, the outgoing president William H. Taft) favored the election of W., who with less than half of the popular votes managed to win fully 435 of the 531 electoral votes. He was re-elected also in 1916 and remained in office until Jan. 1921, when the Republican Harding succeeded him. A pacifist, W. sensed the danger hanging over world peace from the coexistence of the two blocs of the Triple Alliance and of the Anglo-French-Russian Entente and, strengthened in this conviction by Colonel House, his friend, who had a large part in the shaping of United States foreign policy in those years, he attempted to secure world peace through an agreement between the two groups of rival powers. He therefore sent House to Europe in the late spring of 1914, but House's proposals, although accepted in principle by Germany and England, were followed by no positive result. When the world war broke out, W. strove to keep America neutral, but Germany's indiscriminate submarine warfare provoked in Apr. 1917 the United States' intervention on the side of the Entente. To the pontifical note of 1 Aug. 1917 inviting the belligerents to peace, W. responded evasively, wrongly considering it favorable to German militarism. On 8 Jan. 1918, in a speech to Congress, he listed in fourteen points the peace program for an armistice with the central powers: abolition of secret diplomacy; freedom of the seas; removal of economic barriers between nations; reduction of armaments; settlement of the colonial problem; return of Russia to the international community after the restoration of the Tsar; independence of Belgium; restoration of the territorial integrity of France and return of Alsace-Lorraine; delimitation of ethnic frontiers for Italy; autonomous development for the nationalities of the Habsburg Empire; recognition of national rights in the Balkans, and access of Serbia to the sea; protection of minorities in Turkey; independence of Poland; establishment of a League of Nations. The fourteen points contributed to the laying down of arms by the central Empires in Nov. 1918. In the subsequent peace negotiations at Paris, however, W. did not display the energy necessary to oppose the nationalist and chauvinist ambitions of the victorious powers. He did succeed, on the other hand, in bringing the League of Nations into being. Returning home, W. encountered the hostility of a part of the American Senate, which did not intend to grant its approval to the integral text of the Covenant of the League of Nations. The opponents were not in the majority, but they prevented the attainment of the quorum of two thirds necessary for approval. The United States would therefore not have been part of the League. W. suffered a collapse in Sept. 1919, at the end of his presidential term, and lived in seclusion at Washington until his death.

Silvio Furlani