Woodrow Wilson
Thomas Woodrow Wilson (28 December 1856 – 3 February 1924) was an American lawyer and academic who became a politician in the Democratic Party, and was their blundering President of the United States from 1913 to 1921: He was responsible for the issuing of his infamous "Fourteen Points" as a basis for ending World War I[1], and for his statement that he would never sit a the same table to discuss these with any European monarch.
Jewish influence has been stated to have been high during the Wilson administration and to have influenced issues such as the creation of the Federal Reserve and the ultimate American entry into the First World War in 1917.[2] He has frequently been ranked as one of the ten best Presidents by liberal-left historians (and Poland). More recently, in association with the Great Awokening, he has been attacked for now less politically correct racial views.
History
He claimed to be a devout Presbyterian but when he served as President of Princeton University, he appointed the first Jew and the first Roman Catholic to the faculty and overthrew Presbyterians from the Board of Trustees.[3] He then became the reform governor of New Jersey in 1910. With Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft splitting the Republican vote, Wilson was by default elected President as a Democrat in 1912. He proved highly successful in leading a Democratic Congress to pass major legislation including the Federal Trade Commission, the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, the Underwood Tariff, the Federal Farm Loan Act and most notably establishing the Federal Reserve System.
Re-elected narrowly in 1916, he was presented with a vacancy on the Supreme Court, which he succeeded in filling with a controversial nominee, Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish member of the court.[4] His second term centered on World War I. He tried to negotiate a peace in Europe, and failed due to the Allied imposed conditions, Germany began unrestricted submarine warfare; he wrote several notes to Germany. He called on Congress to declare war when the factors that would lead to a favorable decision to enter war built up. Ignoring military affairs, he focused on diplomacy and finance. On the home front he began the first effective draft in 1917, raised billions of dollars through Liberty loans, imposed an income tax, set up the War Industries Board, promoted labor union growth, supervised agriculture and food production through the Lever Act, took over control of the railroads, and suppressed anti-war movements.
He paid surprisingly little attention to military affairs, but ensured that the USA provided the funding, equipment, and food supplies that helped to make Allied victory in late 1918 possible; nevertheless saddling the Allies with vast debts.
Wilson guided American foreign policy to "acquiesce" in the Balfour Declaration without supporting Zionism in an official way. Wilson expressed sympathy for the plight of Jews, especially in Poland and in France.[5]
In the late stages of the war he took personal control of negotiations with Germany, especially with the pronouncement of his "Fourteen Points" and the Armistice. He went to Paris in 1919 to create the League of Nations and shape the Treaty of Versailles, with special attention on creating new nations out of old empires. He refused to compromise with the Republicans who controlled Congress after 1918, effectively destroying any chance for USA ratification of the Treaty of Versailles. President Warren Harding and the Republican Congress repudiated membership in the League of Nations. It came into being anyway, but the USA never joined. Wilson's idealistic internationalism, whereby the USA enters the world arena to fight for "democracy", progressiveness, and liberalism, was a highly controversial position in American foreign policy, serving as a model for "idealists" to emulate or "realists" to reject for the following century.
On October 2, 1919, Wilson suffered a serious stroke, leaving him paralyzed on his left side, and with only partial vision in the right eye, as the USA home front saw massive strikes and race riots, and wartime prosperity turn into postwar depression.
See also
External links
- America Goes to War
- The Jewish Hand in the World Wars, Part 1
- Woodrow Wilson's "Second Personality"
- World War I on the Home Front
Encyclopedias
References
- ↑ Speech on War Aims and Peace Terms, 8 January 1918.
- ↑ The Jewish Hand in the World Wars, Part 1 https://codoh.com/library/document/the-jewish-hand-in-the-world-wars-part-1/en/
- ↑ Heckscher, August, Woodrow Wilson, Easton Press, 1991, p.155, ISBN 978-0-684-19312-0
- ↑ Heckscher, 1991, p.396–7.
- ↑ Walworth (1986) 473–83, esp. p. 481; Urofsky, Melvin I., American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust, (1995) chapter 6; Brecher, Frank W., Reluctant Ally: United States Foreign Policy toward the Jews from Wilson to Roosevelt. (1991) chapters 1–4.
