A Man With a Vision

HE WAS born in Staunton, Virginia, U.S.A., on December 28, 1856. Although he did not begin his formal schooling until he was nine years of age, he went on to a career in education at Princeton University. Then he moved into politics. It was a decision that was to lead him to his greatest glory and to his greatest anguish.

He had a vision of how to bring peace to mankind. Woodrow Wilson’s shadow as a peacemaker still falls across our war-torn earth. On the basis of his plan for peace, some politicians and diplomats are still striving to bring peace to our world.

What happened to Wilson’s vision? Did he have an answer to our problems of hatred, war, and bloodshed?

In 1913 Woodrow Wilson became the 28th president of the United States. The following year the Great War broke out in Europe. It was a war of death and violence in the mud and slime of stagnating trenches, to the accompaniment of nerve-shattering artillery, machine guns, and gas attacks. It was slaughter on a massive scale.

At first, sentiment in America was strongly against involvement in the European conflagration. Americans wanted to remain free of the struggle between Europe’s great powers. Neutrality was the nation’s keynote.

President Wilson, a Presbyterian, was a very religious and idealistic man. He earnestly wanted to preserve America’s neutrality and isolationism. But there were events that he could not control. A German submarine sank the liner Lusitania in 1915, killing 128 Americans in the process. But Wilson refused to declare war on Germany. In 1916 he was reelected president of the United States on the slogan, “He kept us out of war.”

“The World Must Be Made Safe for Democracy”

The following year the Germans announced that all shipping, whether belligerent or neutral, would be fair game to their submarines. This meant that American ships were no longer safe on the high seas. Seemingly, it left Wilson with no alternative. He reluctantly declared war on Germany, stating: “It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance.”

In his speech to Congress, he said that the United States would be fighting “for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples.” Then he uttered his famous phrase, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” Congress approved his decision on April 6, 1917. He was cheered by his peers in the Capitol and by the public outside. But he was not jubilant. “Think of what it was they were applauding,” he later said to one of his aides. “My message today was a message of death for our young men. How strange it seems to applaud that.” A few minutes later, he “wiped away great tears that stood in his eyes, and then laying his head on the cabinet table, sobbed as if he had been a child.”​—Mr. Wilson’s War, by John Dos Passos.

Neutrality was over. His country was now embroiled in the worst war that man had known until then.

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U.S. National Archives