I am inspired by the work of Woodrow Wilson, our 28th President. Although he was a man of his time and thus in his leadership showed flashes of racism and sexism, I believe that Wilson was a man of his country and of ideals. His tour to promote the League of Nations after World War One stands out to me as an act of patriotism and moral conviction. Toward the end of World War I, it seemed apparent that the Allied Powers would triumph. President Wilson was allotted the lofty responsibility of negotiating an end to the conflict with the enemy Central Powers. Wilson addressed the nation on January 8th, 1918 outlining his Fourteen Points, a set of ideas and actions that he believed the 1919 Paris Peace Conference should adopt to maintain world peace. At the time, peace was not a nicety or a well-intentioned hope; it was vital for the future of …show more content…
While he recognized the imperfection of the League and its covenant, he wholeheartedly believed that it had the best chance of steering the world away from future turmoil. Determined to show the American people that his heart was in the right place, Wilson embarked on an ambitious tour of the country late in the summer of 1919. During his three-week journey, the President spoke multiple times per day and in more than thirty cities. He covered nearly 10,000 miles by train during this time, but the distance he completed by train pales in comparison to the mileage he put on his own body. His constant oscillation between speaking engagements and long journeys gave him splitting exhaustion headaches. Eventually, he was forced to cut his tour short and return home after collapsing from exhaustion. A week after returning to the capitol, he suffered a massive stroke that rendered him paralyzed, incapacitated, and nearly dead. Five years later, complications from the stroke took his