The agreement included the charter for the League of Nations , an organization intended to arbitrate international disputes and prevent future wars. Wilson had initially advanced the idea for the League in a January speech to the U.
In September of that year, the president embarked on a cross-country speaking tour to promote his ideas for the League directly to the American people. On the night of September 25, on a train bound for Wichita, Kansas , Wilson collapsed from mental and physical stress, and the rest of his tour was cancelled.
On October 2, he suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. Both times it failed to gain the two-thirds vote required for ratification. The League of Nations held its first meeting in January ; the United States never joined the organization. The era of Prohibition was ushered in on January 17, , when the 18th Amendment, banning the manufacture, sale and transportation of alcohol, went into effect following its ratification one year earlier.
In , Wilson vetoed the National Prohibition Act or Volstead Act , designed to enforce the 18th Amendment; however, his veto was overridden by Congress.
Prohibition lasted until , when it was repealed by the 21st Amendment. Also in , American women gained the right to vote when the 19th Amendment became law that August; Wilson had pushed Congress to pass the amendment.
He and a partner established a law firm, but poor health prevented the president from ever doing any serious work. Wilson died at his home on February 3, , at age Start your free trial today. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Edith Wilson was an American first lady —21 and the second wife of Woodrow Wilson, 28th president of the United States.
Though Edith admitted she had no prior knowledge of—or Ellen Wilson was an American first lady and the first wife of Woodrow Wilson, the 28th president of the United States. I believe that the ancient traditions of a people are its ballast; you cannot make a tabula rasa upon which to write a political program. You cannot take a new sheet of paper and determine what your life shall be tomorrow. You must knit the new into the old. You cannot put a new patch on an old garment without ruining it; it must be not a patch, but something woven into the old fabric, of practically the same pattern, of the same texture and intention.
If I did not believe that to be progressive was to preserve the essentials of our institutions, I for one could not be a progressive. One of the chief benefits I used to derive from being president of a university was that I had the pleasure of entertaining thoughtful men from all over the world. I cannot tell you how much has dropped into my granary by their presence.
I had been casting around in my mind for something by which to draw several parts of my political thought together when it was my good fortune to entertain a very interesting Scotsman who had been devoting himself to the philosophical thought of the seventeenth century. His talk was so engaging that it was delightful to hear him speak of anything, and presently there came out of the unexpected region of his thought the thing I had been waiting for.
He called my attention to the fact that in every generation all sorts of speculation and thinking tend to fall under the formula of the dominant thought of the age. For example, after the Newtonian Theory of the universe had been developed, almost all thinking tended to express itself in the analogies of the Newtonian Theory, and since the Darwinian Theory has reigned amongst us, everybody is likely to express whatever he wishes to expound in terms of development and accommodation to environment.
Now, it came to me, as this interesting man talked, that the Constitution of the United States had been made under the dominion of the Newtonian Theory. You have only to read the papers of the The Federalist to see that fact written on every page.
They were only following the English Whigs, who gave Great Britain its modern constitution. Not that those Englishmen analyzed the matter, or had any theory about it; Englishmen care little for theories. The makers of our Federal Constitution read Montesquieu with true scientific enthusiasm. They were scientists in their way—the best way of their age—those fathers of the nation. Politics in their thought was a variety of mechanics. The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation.
The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live. On the contrary, its life is dependent upon their quick cooperation, their ready response to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of purpose.
Government is not a body of blind forces; it is a body of men, with highly differentiated functions, no doubt, in our modern day, of specialization, with a common task and purpose. Their cooperation is indispensable, their warfare fatal. There can be no successful government without the intimate, instinctive coordination of the organs of life and action.
This is not theory, but fact, and displays its force as fact, whatever theories may be thrown across its track. Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop. Some citizens of this country have never got beyond the Declaration of Independence, signed in Philadelphia, July 4th, Their bosoms swell against George III, but they have no consciousness of the war for freedom that is going on today.
The Declaration of Independence did not mention the questions of our day. It is of no consequence to us unless we can translate its general terms into examples of the present day and substitute them in some vital way for the examples it itself gives, so concrete, so intimately involved in the circumstances of the day in which it was conceived and written. It is an eminently practical document, meant for the use of practical men; not a thesis for philosophers, but a whip for tyrants; not a theory for government, but a program of action.
Unless we can translate it into the questions of our own day, we are not worthy of it, we are not the sons of the sires who acted in response to its challenge.
What form does the contest between tyranny and freedom take to-day? What is the special form of tyranny we now fight? How does it endanger the rights of the people, and what do we mean to do in order to make our contest against it effectual? What are to be the items of our new declaration of independence?
By tyranny, as we now fight it, we mean control of the law, of legislation and adjudication, by organizations which do not represent the people, by means which are private and selfish. We mean, specifically, the conduct of our affairs and the shaping of our legislation in the interest of special bodies of capital and those who organize their use.
We mean the alliance, for this purpose, of political machines with selfish business. We mean the exploitation of the people by legal and political means.
We have seen many governments under these influences cease to be representative governments, cease to be governments representative of the people, and become governments representative of special interests, controlled by machines, which in their turn are not controlled by the people.
Sometimes, when I think of the growth of our economic system, it seems to me as if, leaving our law just about where it was before any of the modern inventions or developments took place, we had simply at haphazard extended the family residence, added an office here and a workroom there, and a new set of sleeping rooms there, built up higher on our foundations, and put out little lean-tos on the side, until we have a structure that has no character whatever.
Now, the problem is to continue to live in the house and yet change it. Well, we are architects in our time, and our architects are also engineers. What we have to undertake is to systematize the foundations of the house, then to thread all the old parts of the structure with the steel which will be laced together in modern fashion, accommodated to all the modern knowledge of structural strength and elasticity, and then slowly change the partitions, relay the walls, let in the light through new apertures, improve the ventilation; until finally, a generation or two from now, the scaffolding will be taken away, and there will be the family in a great building whose noble architecture will at last be disclosed, where men can live as a single community, cooperative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive, not afraid of any storm of nature, not afraid of any artificial storm, any imitation of thunder and lightning, knowing that the foundations go down to the bedrock of principle, and knowing that whenever they please they can change that plan again and accommodate it as they please to the altering necessities of their lives.
Men can now hold up against us the reproach that we have not adjusted our lives to modern conditions to the same extent that they have adjusted theirs. I was very much interested in some of the reasons given by our friends across the Canadian border for being very shy about the reciprocity arrangements. Well, we have started now at all events.
The procession is under way. He is asleep in the back part of his house. And when he wakes up, the country will be empty. He will be deserted, and he will wonder what has happened. Nothing has happened. The world has been going on. The world has a habit of going on. The world has always neglected stand-patters. And, therefore, the stand-patter does not excites my indignation; he excited my sympathy. He is going to be so lonely before it is all over.
We are not going to do him any harm. We are going to show him a good time. Progressivism and World War 1. The Significance of the Frontier in American Histo The Significance of History.
Democracy and Education Chapter 6. Democracy and Education Chapter 7. He continued to contribute to the study of political science and history with his publication of The State, a biography of George Washington, Division and Reunion, and a History of the American People.
Wilson also found time to start a family. The two were married on June 24, , in Savannah, Georgia. By , they had three children: Margaret, Jessie, and Eleanor. In Woodrow Wilson was unanimously elected president of Princeton University, becoming the first man besides a clergyman to hold the office.
As president of the university, Wilson initiated many education reforms. He devised and implemented the preceptorial system to replace the large impersonal lectures with smaller, more personal group teaching. This method of teaching is now standard in many colleges throughout the country.
His quadrangle plan called for the creation of several campus dormitories that would also house dining facilities, libraries, and classrooms in an attempt to eliminate the pretentious eating clubs that dominated the university's social scene. Although Wilson was unsuccessful in implementing this plan, many other American universities later used his idea.
Even though Wilson worked over twenty years as an educator, he had never abandoned his dream of becoming a statesman, and when he was presented with the opportunity to jump into politics in , he took it. In , the local New Jersey Democratic political machine bosses sought an honorable and trustworthy candidate to run for the state's gubernatorial office.
They found Wilson, who agreed to run for governor as long as he could also run for President of the United States in the upcoming national elections.
Wilson won the election by a landslide, and quickly became known as a progressive Democratic governor for his reform politics. In his campaign to reform government, he even attacked the same political machines that had earlier supported him. His success as Governor gave him national fame as a man of action, and he was therefore given the Democratic nomination for President in Because of the rift within the Republican Party that year, Wilson received an overwhelming majority of the Electoral College votes and became the twenty-eighth President of the United States.
Wilson continued to initiate reforms. His domestic policy reforms were collectively known as the New Freedom and involved creating a national banking system, prosecuting the trusts, and reducing the national tariff. New York State required voters to demonstrate literacy in English. Libraries publicly burned German books.
Some communities banned playing the music of German musicians such as Bach and Beethoven, and schools dropped German courses from their curriculum. To avoid such violence, others anglicized their names. President Wilson sponsored the Espionage and Sedition Acts, prohibiting interference with the draft and outlawing criticism of the government, the armed forces, or the war effort.
Violators were imprisoned or fined. Some 1, people were arrested for violating these laws, including Eugene V. Debs, leader of the Socialist Party. The Post Office was empowered to censor the mail, and more than periodicals were deprived of mailing privileges for greater or lesser periods of time. In one incident, Justice Department agents raided IWW offices nationwide, arresting union leaders who were sentenced to jail terms of up to twenty-five years.
The IWW never recovered from this persecution. Grant Rutherford B. Hayes James A. Garfield Chester A. Roosevelt Harry S. Truman Dwight D. Eisenhower John F. Kennedy Lyndon B. Bush Bill Clinton George W. Help inform the discussion Support the Miller Center. University of Virginia Miller Center. Woodrow Wilson: Domestic Affairs.
0コメント