Really Cool Stuff about Woodrow Wilson
1. Wilson had dyslexia and did not learn to read until 10 years of age. “A later generation of pediatricians and educators likely would have diagnosed dyslexia, but in Tommy’s time the boy just seemed slow…He perceived letters and words as possessing a mysterious power, a power not easily captured and the more potent for its elusiveness and mystery. When he finally did decode the alphabet and enter the priesthood of the literate, he felt an exhilaration that stayed with him his whole life” (p. 3).
2. Wilson was the author of several books. He wrote Congressional Government (1885), The State (1889), and History of the American People (1902).
3. The election of 1912 was the first national election that used state primaries to affect election results. “The election of 1912 was the first in which party primaries played on important role” (p. 19).
4. Wilson was the first president to read the State of the Union address personally to the Senate. Previous presidents had simply written this address and had it sent over to Congress where an orator would read it aloud. When asked about this change in tradition, Wilson said “I think that this is the only dignified way for the President to address the houses on the opening of a session, instead of sending the thing up by messenger and letting the clerk read it perfunctorily in the familiar clerk’s tone of voice” (p. 29-30).
5. The Congress during Wilson’s first term, established loads of progressive legislation. “The latter had been busy delivering legislation progressives had sought for some time: banishing most child labor, mandating an eight-hour day for railroad workers, establishing an inheritance tax” (p. 71).
6. Wilson barely won the 1916 election—barely. In fact, he went to bed the night of the elections thinking that Charles Evans Hughes had already won. “He went to bed behind in the balloting and woke up to read papers proclaiming Hughes the next president. But late returns from the West eroded Hughes’ lead, and in the following days Wilson nosed in front. He finally won by a margin of 23 electoral votes and not quite 700,000 popular votes” (p. 72).
7. When Wilson attended the Paris Peace Conference, he was doing something that no other American president had done before. Traditionally heads of state were not involved in treaty-making. “But again Wilson overruled the naysayers. He wasn’t simply a head of state; he was also a head of government, and in this regard quite the equivalent of Clemenceau and Lloyd George. Moreover, supremely confident of his eloquence, he knew that no one—not Lansing, not House—could speak as forcefully as he for the League of Nations, the linchpin, as he saw it, of any satisfactory settlement” (p. 103).
8. In the same vein, when Wilson attended the peace conference, he was the first president to travel away from the United States for such a long length of time, December through February. “The conference wasn’t over, and he [Wilson] made clear he would be back. But no American president had ever been gone from the United States so long, and with Republicans newly in control of Congress, Wilson felt obliged to return to Washington to remind them that the Democrats still ran the executive branch” (p. 107).
9. In another break with tradition, Wilson personally carried the Treaty of Versailles over to Congress. “On July 10 Wilson personally delivered the treaty to the Senate (breaking another long-standing tradition)” (p. 118).
10. During Wilson’s presidency, the 18th (Prohibition) and 19th (Women could vote) amendments were passed.
Woodrow Wilson was, I thought, rather an odd guy. His view of the presidency and the way that he handled presidential affairs spoke of the fact that he was first and foremost a scholar. I thought it was interesting that the failure of the Treaty of Versailles in the United States was a direct result of Wilson’s poor decision-making.
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