CELTIC
CORNER
Some more stories about the Irish Immigrants
Woodrow
Wilson was a bespectacled, ascetic looking man who resembled a schoolteacher.
Indeed, for a good part of his life, he was one. He knew how to exploit
opportunity. At one point during his presidency, he had sheep graze on the
South Lawn of the White House, selling their wool to raise money for charity.
Both of
Wilson’s paternal grandparents came from the Strabane area of County Antrim. He
was raised by stern father, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, a Presbyterian minister and
theologian, and a mother who was the daughter of minister in England. Both were
of Scotch Irish lineage.
He was
born on December 28, 1856 in Staunton, Virginia but a year later his family
moved to Augusta, Georgia.
He
graduated from the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton, in 1879
and received a Ph.D. in government and history in 1886 from Johns Hopkins
University.
He held a
variety of academic positions in the years following graduation, including a
fifteen year stint at Princeton, which was capped by his being appointed
university president in 1902, apparently fatigued by academic life, he entered
politics, accepting the Democratic nomination for governor of New Jersey in
1910.
His
political beliefs were described by the word “progressivism,” and he had a
number of goals: to eliminate political corruption, to institute antitrust
legislation and to restructure the election system by using direct primaries.
At the time, the last proposal would not have been advantageous for his party
and was a courageous move on his part.
He won the
election handily and America began to take notice of him. Two years later in
1912 Wilson started a run for the presidential nomination. His chief opponent
for the Democratic nomination was Champ Clark, speaker of the House of
Representatives.
It was a
grueling nomination fight, requiring forty six ballots, but Wilson eventually
prevailed.
As it
turned out the election campaign was a cakewalk by comparison. The Republican
Party was split between William Howard Taft and Teddy Roosevelt (who was
running as an Independent) and Wilson overwhelmed them both.
Once in
office, Wilson helped establish the Clayton Act, an amendment to the Sherman
Antitrust Act, which strengthened labor’s ability to strike, established the
Federal Reserve Board to help control the currency and instituted the income
tax.
As
dominant as he was in domestic matters, Wilson was even more influential in
foreign one. (He was the first president to leave the United States while
president) During his presidency, the United States became involved in the
affairs of a number of countries. Wilson always had a justification for these
acts, which is where some historians question his sincerity. Perhaps he was so
imbued with righteous indignation that he never realized he could be morally
wrong.
The event
in which Wilson’s lack of moral insight had the biggest impact was World War I
When war broke out between France and Great Britain and
Germany, Wilson was at first neutral. In fact, in 1916 he conducted a
successful reelection campaign based on the slogan “He kept us out of the war.”
In fact,
he was hardly neutral. He put the not insignificant industrial might of the United
States at the disposal of France and Britain. And he became outraged at the
torpedoing of ships with Americans on board. He became more warlike in this
pronouncements but swathed them in high toned rhetoric such as “establishing a
peace that will win the approval of mankind” and “an equality of right.”
On April
2, 1917 Wilson delivered a speech to Congress with the oft quoted line “the
world must be made safe for democracy.” Finally America was in it and surely a
crucial partner for the Allies.
Following
the war, Wilson was one of the important architects of the League of Nations,
which essentially detailed the rules by which nations would deal with one
another. When the League of Nations’ charter was examined by Congress, the
Senate thought it compromised the United States’ sovereign rights and wanted to
make changes Wilson found abhorrent. In a cruel twist of fate, Wilson found
himself making a whistle stop tour across the country urging Americans to
pressure their representatives not to support it.
It was
while he was on this jaunt in Pueblo, Colorado that Wilson suffered a stroke
that left him temporarily unable to speak. From that time on, his wife, Edith,
virtually took over in what was described by cynics as the “petticoat
presidency.”
His last
words to Edith were “Edith, I’m a broken machine, but I’m ready.” The day he spoke
them was February 3, 1924. He proved to be more popular in death than life.
Happy Valentines Day
Lá Fhéile Vailintín sona
duit
Frank
Darcy
