Fourteen Points

Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) served as the 28th president of the United States from 1913 to 1921. Born in Virginia, he became a professor of political science, then president of Princeton University, and finally governor of New Jersey before his successful presidential run. He helped make the Democrats the party that represented the Progressive Movement. He was the first Southerner elected president since the Civil War, whose devastation he witnessed as a boy.

As an academic, Wilson thought deeply about the principles behind both effective and just government. He embraced the Progressive Movement’s idealism that said the government could be a force for good by upholding the rights of the weak. He carried these ideas into international affairs as the call for justice in the “Fourteen Points” speech clearly shows.

Wilson rose to the presidency in part because people considered him a powerful orator. The fact that he gave this major policy proposal as a speech was no accident. He was conscious of the need to persuade people of his views. In many ways, the Progressive Movement saw itself as a moral crusade, and Wilson’s preferred rhetoric of moral conflict fit that vision. At times, Wilson sounds like a preacher rather than a statesman.

Wilson, like many Americans at the time, was reluctant to enter a major European war. Following George Washington’s Farewell Address in 1796, in which the first president warned against being ensnared in foreign quarrels, the US maintained a long tradition of isolating itself (with some exceptions). Wilson’s firsthand experience of the devastation caused by the Civil War may have reinforced this desire for peace. When he ran for reelection in 1916, he boasted that he had kept America out of war. Therefore, it is no coincidence that peace is a major theme of this speech. It is likely that in early 1918 he wanted to achieve peace as quickly as possible and that this influenced his willingness to picture liberals in Germany as people with whom he could negotiate.