Why woodrow wilson failed

He was born in Virginia in , the son of a Presbyterian minister who during the Civil War was a pastor in Augusta, Georgia, and during Reconstruction a professor in the charred city of Columbia, South Carolina.

In he married Ellen Louise Axson. Wilson advanced rapidly as a conservative young professor of political science and became president of Princeton in His growing national reputation led some conservative Democrats to consider him Presidential timber.

First they persuaded him to run for Governor of New Jersey in In the campaign he asserted his independence of the conservatives and of the machine that had nominated him, endorsing a progressive platform, which he pursued as governor.

In the three-way election he received only 42 percent of the popular vote but an overwhelming electoral vote.

Wilson maneuvered through Congress three major pieces of legislation. The first was a lower tariff, the Underwood Act; attached to the measure was a graduated Federal income tax.

The passage of the Federal Reserve Act provided the Nation with the more elastic money supply it badly needed. In antitrust legislation established a Federal Trade Commission to prohibit unfair business practices. Another burst of legislation followed in One new law prohibited child labor; another limited railroad workers to an eight-hour day. But after the election Wilson concluded that America could not remain neutral in the World War. On April 2,, he asked Congress for a declaration of war on Germany.

He laid out a vision for a just and peaceful world, a future that included free seas, an international agreement to avoid arms races, a United States that served as a peace broker, and most important of all--peace without victory. He had witnessed the Civil War firsthand as a boy, which contributed to his desire to avoid sending men to the meat-grinder trenches in Europe. Despite the German attack on the British liner Lusitania in , when Americans died , Wilson declined to declare war in the immediate aftermath.

He did, however, demand that Germany curtail submarine warfare and allowed American banks to make loans to Britain and U. On December 18, Wilson sent letters to foreign embassies to ask for their respective terms of peace, and he thought those terms could be negotiated. Whatever his personal feelings were, Wilson firmly believed no peace could last if it favored a victor, writes scholar Robert W.

The diplomat and historian George F. In asking the leaders of the Provisional Government simultaneously to consolidate their political power and to revive and continue participation in the war, the Allies were asking the impossible. Russia almost certainly would have quit the war earlier, with the Russian Army still intact and capable of defending the Provisional Government from a Bolshevik coup.

Historian R. Rummel estimated that almost 62 million people were killed by the Soviet government. Nothing Wilson did could compensate for the colossal blunder of entering World War I. They vowed to continue not fighting each other. Member nations agreed to join in defending any of them that might be attacked, which meant that the league was another alliance.

An attack on one member nation would lead to a wider war. World War I should remind us that the consequences of war are extremely difficult to predict and often impossible to control.

The world would have been better off if America had stayed out of that war and pursued a policy of armed neutrality.

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