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Woodrow Wilson—Then and Now
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2022
Extract
It was in this house that Wilson, after the burdens of public office, sought “some ease.” In words I quote from John Milton's “Samson Agonistes:”
“Ease to the body some, none
to the mind
From restless thoughts, that
like a deadly swarm
Of hornets armed, no sooner
found alone
But rush upon me
thronging, and present
Times past, what once I was,
and what am now.”
One cannot speak of Woodrow Wilson fifty years after his death without recalling his last tragic days. Most poignant is Raymond Fosdick's account:
“I went down to Washington to see him…. It was less than a month before he died, and it was very obvious that his strength was failing, although his mind was keen and alert. When I said to him: ‘How are you, Mr. President,’ he quoted a remark by John Quincy Adams in answer to a similar query: ‘John Quincy Adams is all right, but the house he lives in is dilapidated, and it looks as if he would soon have to move out’…. His whole thought centered on the League of Nations, and I had never heard him speak with deeper or more moving earnestness. In his weakness the tears came easily to his eyes and sometimes rolled down his cheek, but he brushed them impatiently away. I think he had a premonition that his days were numbered - “The sands are running fast,’ he told me - and perhaps he Wanted to make his last testament clear and unmistakable. The League of Nations was a promise for a better future, he said, as well as an escape from an evil past. Constantly his mind ran back to 1914. The utter unintelligence of it all, the sheer waste of war as a method of settling anything, seemed to oppress him. ‘It never must happen again,’ he said. ‘There is a way out if only men will use it.’ His voice rose as he recalled the charge of idealism so often used against the League. ‘The world is run by ideals,’ he exclaimed. ‘Only the fool thinks otherwise.’ The League was the answer. It was the next logical step in man’s widening conception of order and law. The machinery might be changed by experience, but the core of the idea was essential. It was in line with human evolution. It was the will of God.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1974
Footnotes
*
This address was presented in observance of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Woodrow Wilson on February 4, 1974, at the Woodrow Wilson House, Washington, D.C. The author, Pendleton Herring, President Emeritus of the Social Science Research Council since 1968, is President of The Woodrow Wilson Foundation.
References
1 On March 4, 1921 Wilson, after the Harding inauguration, moved into his newly acquired residence at 2340 S Street, N.W. There he remained a semi-invalid until his death, Sunday morning, February 3, 1924. The House, as Mrs. Wilson bequeathed it to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is open to the public and welcomes visitors daily from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
2 The Poetical Works of John Milton, (MacMillan & Co., London 1911) p. 357.
3 Foskick, Raymond B., “Personal Recollections of Woodrow Wilson,” in Latham, Earl, Ed., The Philosophy and Policies of Woodrow Wilson, (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958) p. 44.Google Scholar Lecture delivered at the University of Chicago, January 30, 1956.
4 The Politics of Woodrow Wilson, Selections from His Speeches and Writings, Edited with an Introduction by Heckscher, August, (Harper and Brothers, New York, 1956) p. 192.Google Scholar
5 Wilson, Woodrow, Constitutional Government in the United States, (Columbua University Press, New York, 1908) p.70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 August Heckscher, op. cit., p. 302.
7 Link, Arthur S., Woodrow Wilson: A Brief Biography, (The World Publishing Company, Cleveland, 1963) p. 155.Google Scholar
8 William L. Langer, “Woodrow Wilson: His Education in World Affairs,” in Earl Latham, Ed., op. cit. p. 166. Address delivered at the Harvard Commemoration of the Birth of Woodrow Wilson, March 7, 1956.
9 Wilson's only major statement in his years of retirement was, as August Heckscher explains: “An article wrung out word by word in sickness He returns to the preoccupation with social justice which had fired his vision of the New Freedom.” “The Road Away from Revolution” (The Atlantic Monthly, August 1923) reprinted as Epilogue in The Politics of Woodrow Wilson, op. cit. p. 383.