Woodrow Wilson Dbq

Woodrow Wilson, through his tenure as President of Princeton University, as Governor of New Jersey, and then in his two presidential terms, demonstrated strong broad based leadership. Although political ineptness and a lack of charisma sometimes marked his career, Wilson generally, compensated with a pervading morality and intellect. So it was with his greatest achievement, the Fourteen Points—and most especially—the League of Nations to which he committed his life after 1918-1919. Yet, in an era in which the Congress fiercely guarded its war powers, the Senate, was under thee powerful Republican influence. The failure of the US in joining the League is attributable to the power of both the liberal and conservative opposition.

Leading the

were progressives, supporting direction election of senators, a national income tax, and other political reforms like referendum, initiative petition, and recall. Borah also opposed the Espionage Act and even lobbied for Eugene Debs’ exoneration, and thus, one can infer that the senator’s anti-Wilson sentiment was born several years prior to the debate over the Treaty. Significantly, domestic reformers were not necessarily progressives in diplomacy, and progressive organizations such as Jane Addams’s “The Woman’s Peace Party” often, “found [their] Branches fairly divided upon the subject” of an international organization [Doc. I]. Nonetheless, the progressive senators had major influence in the Senate and therefore held seats on committees such as the Foreign Relations Committee that were critical to the defeat of the

Truly, Wilson’s first major mistake was not inviting one of the major Republican congressmen such as Lodge to attend the peace proceedings in Paris. But in truth, the excerpt reveals Wilson’s true motive for the issue. The idealist radiates from Wilson’s words in the allusions to “the boys who went across the water to fight,” and it is evident that he truly believed that a cause as prodigious as preserving world peace would somehow render a nonpartisan act of approval from Congress. [which was a colossal miscalculation of Wilson, given the men who were in the Senate!] Naturally then, Wilson would wanted Article X included at all costs {Document C]. However, his failure to reconcile political reality leaves Wilson in a state of diplomatic