Why Every President Sucked

No. 28 · The Presidents

Woodrow Wilson’s Biggest Failures

1913–1921

A Nobel laureate who segregated the civil service, jailed dissenters and lost his own League of Nations.

Who was Woodrow Wilson?

Woodrow Wilson was the 28th president of the United States, serving from March 4, 1913 to March 4, 1921. A Virginia-raised Presbyterian minister’s son, he earned a doctorate at Johns Hopkins, became a political scientist and the president of Princeton, then governor of New Jersey, and won the White House in 1912 on a platform he called the “New Freedom.” He led the country through the First World War, won the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize, and spent his last two years in office incapacitated by a stroke.

Why is Woodrow Wilson considered one of the most controversial presidents?

Wilson is not bottom-tier. He is a president whose ranking has fallen. C-SPAN’s historians had him 6th in 2000, 9th in 2009, 11th in 2017 and 13th in 2021. Siena’s scholars moved him from 6th in 2002 to 13th in 2022, and the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project put him 15th, down from 10th in 2015. The Greatness Project also listed him as the fourth most over-rated president.

The category data shows why. In C-SPAN’s survey, Wilson’s rank on “pursued equal justice for all” fell from 20th in 2000 to 37th in 2021, one of the largest drops of any president. His moral authority rank fell from 6th to 19th. Siena’s scholars rank him 37th on ability to compromise. He is still 9th on vision and 8th on intelligence.

In my book, Wilson’s entry is about the Federal Reserve. I’ll get to that, but the record that has changed historians’ minds is mostly elsewhere. What follows is that record, with the song I wrote for him threaded through.

Chords: C, Em, G, D/F♯

I'm sick of the ups and the downs
What if we turn things around?

1. He segregated the federal government

At a cabinet meeting on April 11, 1913, Postmaster General Albert Burleson proposed segregating the Railway Mail Service. According to the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum, Burleson said he was uncomfortable with Black and white employees sharing the same glasses, towels and washrooms. Wilson’s reported answer was that he had made no promises to Black Americans except to do them justice and wanted the matter adjusted with the least friction. Soon after, Burleson and Treasury Secretary William McAdoo segregated their departments, with no objection from the president.

Separate work areas, lunchrooms and restrooms followed in offices that had been integrated for decades. Black employees were downgraded or pushed out. Historian Eric Yellin’s Racism in the Nation’s Service is the standard account.

On November 12, 1914, Wilson met with the Black newspaper editor William Monroe Trotter, who asked him whether he had “a new freedom for white Americans and a new slavery for your Afro-American fellow citizens.” The transcript has Wilson answering that segregation was “not humiliating, but a benefit.” The Washington Times headlined the meeting “Colored Delegate Rebuked by Wilson.”

2. He screened The Birth of a Nation at the White House

On February 18, 1915, the film, based on the novel by Thomas Dixon, Wilson’s fellow graduate student at Johns Hopkins, was shown in the East Room. It glorified the Ku Klux Klan, and it used lines from Wilson’s own History of the American People in its title cards about Reconstruction.

One famous line needs a warning: the quote that the film was “like writing history with lightning” and “terribly true.” Historian Mark Benbow found that Wilson almost certainly never said it. It did not appear in print for more than two decades, and it traces back to publicity by the film’s makers. The one firsthand record of Wilson’s view is a 1918 letter calling the film “a very unfortunate production.” The screening is documented. The quote isn’t.

3. He jailed dissenters

The Espionage Act of June 1917 and the Sedition Act of May 1918 made it a crime to obstruct the war effort or criticize the government. Estimates vary because there is no official tally. One careful secondary count has 2,168 cases tried between 1917 and 1921, with 1,055 convictions. Burleson also used the Post Office to deny the mails to radical newspapers.

The most famous case was Eugene Debs, the Socialist leader, who was arrested after an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio on June 16, 1918, and was sentenced to ten years. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction unanimously in Debs v. United States (1919), in an opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Debs served from April 1919 and ran for president from the Atlanta penitentiary. Wilson did not release him. Harding commuted his sentence in December 1921, and Debs walked out on Christmas Day.

4. He stayed silent through the pandemic

The 1918 influenza killed about 675,000 Americans, according to the CDC. John Barry, the leading historian of the pandemic, says Wilson “never made a public statement about the pandemic. Never.” Not every historian agrees this was a failure; Howard Markel argues silence is not the same as downplaying. What is not disputed is that Wilson fell ill himself in Paris in April 1919 with what his doctor called influenza, and that the press was told he was fine.

5. “Let Lodge compromise”

Wilson’s signature project was the League of Nations. He carried the Treaty of Versailles home and never gave ground on it. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge offered reservations, and Wilson refused them. In November 1919, he urged Senate Democrats to vote against the treaty with Lodge’s reservations, and on November 19 the Senate voted it down twice, 39 to 55 with the reservations and 38 to 53 without. Senate.gov notes that, in the face of Wilson’s continued unwillingness to negotiate, it was the first time the Senate had ever rejected a peace treaty. A second try in March 1920 fell seven votes short.

6. The hidden presidency

Wilson went west in September 1919 to sell the treaty to the public. He collapsed in Pueblo, Colorado on September 25, and a massive stroke followed at the White House on October 2. It left his left side paralyzed. For the rest of his term, his wife Edith controlled who saw him, and she later called it her “stewardship.” Secretary of State Robert Lansing was forced out in February 1920 after calling cabinet meetings. The 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967, was written partly with this episode in mind.

7. Self-determination for whom?

The Fourteen Points promised a world of self-determination, but not equally. Wilson sent troops to Veracruz in 1914, occupied Haiti from 1915, and the Dominican Republic from 1916. A young Vietnamese activist, Nguyen Ai Quoc, later Ho Chi Minh, petitioned the peace conference in 1919, as did Egyptian, Korean, Irish and Indian delegations. Historian Erez Manela calls this the “Wilsonian Moment.” Nothing came of it.

The ups and the downs
Got on everybody's nerves
so good ol' Woodrow
Made the Federal Reserve

The Federal Reserve

Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act on December 23, 1913. In my book, I argue the Fed was a mistake: a system meant to smooth out booms and busts that instead made it easier to spend money the country did not have. That is my view as a songwriter, and economists do not share it uniformly. The Fed is also routinely listed among Wilson’s major achievements, and I will say so plainly.

One more correction, to my own book. The line that Wilson later said “I have unwittingly ruined my country” is widely attributed to him. I could not find a primary source for it, so I have left it out of the factual part of this article. It stays in the song.

The goal of the system
Is to keep the system up
but that doesn't fix the problem

In fairness

Wilson also signed the Clayton Antitrust Act and created the Federal Trade Commission in 1914, backed the modern income tax, and endorsed woman suffrage before the Senate on September 30, 1918. The 16th Amendment was ratified just before he took office, so he can’t take credit for it. Wilson’s defenders, including biographers John Milton Cooper and A. Scott Berg, argue that his vision shaped the century.

After the White House

Wilson died on February 3, 1924, in Washington. In June 2020, Princeton’s trustees removed his name from the School of Public and International Affairs and from Wilson College. Their statement said his “racist thinking and policies make him an inappropriate namesake.” The board had voted to keep the name in 2016. His fall in the surveys tracks that shift in how historians weigh his record.

It's Woodrow admitting
A few years later
“I have unwittingly
Ruined my country.”

Hear the song

Read the full lyrics, browse all 43 songs, read more articles, or head to the book.

Sources

By Eric Olsen · Published