Woodrow Wilson shared with Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt the ability to articulate a powerful vision of a more egalitarian and just America while also garnering enthusiastic popular support for needed economic and social changes. Together their polices shaped America’s domestic and international policies for much of the 20th century.

While Teddy Roosevelt is best remembered for his trust-busting rhetoric and his vigorous expansion of America’s national parks, and Franklin Roosevelt for his endurance in guiding the country through the Great Depression and the Second World War, Woodrow Wilson’s greatest achievement was an idea: the creation of a world body devoted to eliminating the scourge of war by collective maintenance of peace.

In this in-depth and highly readable biography, A. Scott Berg paints a comprehensive portrait of Wilson.

His political ascent was precipitous. When he won election as governor of New Jersey in 1910, he did so by advocating progressive policies intended to curb the amassed power of the wealthy elite of the Gilded Age. As governor, he tackled the serious corruption continuing to plague the state government of New Jersey as well as its cities and, in the process, found himself confronting powerful members of the legislature who were complicit in, and benefited from, such corruption.

However, his time in the state’s executive mansion turned out to be extraordinarily brief, as he became the Democratic Party’s candidate for the presidency in 1912. That November, Wilson was elected in a landslide.

Although Wilson campaigned on a domestic agenda, from his first day in office he found himself confronted with multiple challenges resulting from the onset of the First World War.

In the hopes of bringing the conflict to an early end, he partnered with his Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, in offering the intermediating services of the neutral United States for negotiating peace among the warring parties. These efforts failed, largely because each side believed they could bring the struggle to a successful conclusion quickly.

In 1916, Wilson won reelection by promising to “keep America out of war”, but eventually succumbed to political passions enflamed by Germany’s practice of unrestricted submarine warfare.

Wilson declared war on Germany on April 2, 1917, determined that this horrible conflict would be “the war to end all wars.” Fearing that the European allies intended to craft a punitive peace treaty that would only ensure the ongoing cycle of retribution, Wilson formed a committee of scholars and world experts, called the Inquiry, to submit proposals for achieving the alternative: a just and lasting peace.

Wilson’s “Fourteen Points,” published in January of 1914, were a direct outgrowth of the Inquiry’s findings. He intended them for the “people of the world,” hoping that if they would embrace them they could bring helpful counter-pressure to bear upon their more punitive-inclined leaders.

Wilson’s collective proposals included provisions for the territorial integrity of all countries, self-determination of peoples, open negotiation of treaties (ending the practice of secret treaties), the removal of all economic barriers so that all peoples could benefit from free and unrestricted trade.

The Fourteenth Point — the creation of a League of Nations — Wilson believed the most important, as it would be the means of monitoring and enforcing all of the other provisions. It was his fervent intent that the League would work to protect the few from the many, while simultaneously advancing the cause of all. Unfortunately, domestic and international forces were already at work undermining his hopes.

Treat Germany generously?

Because the Republicans gained control of the Senate in the elections of 1918, the eventual fate of the Treaty of Paris — and the League of Nations of which it was an integral part — now lay in the hands of one of Wilson’s most intractable opponents — Henry Cabot Lodge.

Subsequent evidence reveals that Lodge had determined — even before knowing what the Treaty contained — to defeat it. In addition, Wilson’s primary negotiating partners at Versailles — British Prime Minister Lloyd-George and French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau — were hard-core nationalists. Both thought much of Wilson’s 14 Points to be idealistic nonsense. (Give up our colonial holdings? Treat Germany generously?)

When the conference finally concluded after many months, an exhausted Wilson returned to the United States determined to fight for the Treaty’s adoption. Despite the multiple ways it fell far short of the 14 Points, reflecting Clemenceau’s goals much more than his own, it still contained what he thought its vital cornerstone — the League of Nations.

As he grasped the depth of Lodge’s opposition, as well as the large number of other senators who expressed serious reservations about various aspects of the treaty, he decided — characteristically — that he must take his case “to the people”. Wilson embarked on a nation-wide whistle-stop tour in order to rouse the people to counter the senators in far-off Washington.

This venture — traveling thousands of miles in just a few weeks — would have taxed the strength of a younger, fully healthy man. Unfortunately, Wilson was neither. On September 25, 1919, just past the mid-way point of the tour, the president collapsed with a severe headache. The news was grim: it became evident that he had suffered a serious stroke.

With Wilson effectively out of the picture for many months, his Democratic allies in the Senate fought furiously to salvage what they could, and did succeed in getting several helpful amendments adopted. Unfortunately, they were unable to peel off other more stringent conditions the Senate added to the peace treaty, conditions that in any event were unlikely to be concurred with by the treaty’s other signatories. Since the provision creating the League of Nations remained intact, they hoped they could persuade Wilson to accept the treaty as amended.

It all came to naught, however. Wilson, his innate stubbornness reinforced by grave physical weakness (and, perhaps, diminished mental flexibility), refused to endorse the treaty as long as any amendments were attached. In the end, the Senate failed to ratify the treaty and, instead, concluded separate treaties of peace with the warring parties.

One cannot help but wonder how differently the history of the 20th century might have unfolded had the Senate endorsed the Treaty of Versailles following World War I and embraced American membership in the League of Nations.

But the Senate’s rejection of both eliminated the possibility that America’s participation might have succeeded in modifying the harshest provisions towards Germany and which, in return, might have created the chaotic conditions that subsequently arose, paving the road for the emergence of fascism.

A century later, it is clear that Woodrow Wilson was right in so many ways: in his demand that pettiness had to end, that all attempts by one nation — or alliances of nations — to control others had to stop, that exploiting peoples through colonization was wrong, and that the many strutting rivalries that repeatedly plunge nations into armed conflict were, at base, silly and pretentious.

The author has been a college teacher of American history and political science, and director of the US National Catholic Rural Life Conference; he served as a member of the Iowa State House of Representatives, and retired from public service in the Iowa executive branch in 2004.