Woodrow Wilson: USA (Makers Of The Modern World) Ebook Rar
Napoleon Hauck
And do our laws take note of this curious state of things? Dothey even attempt to distinguish between a man's act as acorporation director and as an individual? They do not. Our lawsstill deal with us on the basis of the old system. The law is stillliving in the dead past which we have left behind. This is evident,for instance, with regard to the matter of employers' liability forworkingmen's injuries. Suppose that a superintendent wants aworkman to use a certain piece of machinery which it is not safefor him to use, and that the workman is injured by that piece ofmachinery. Some of our courts have held that the superintendent isa fellow-servant, or, as the law states it, a fellow-employee, andthat, therefore, the man cannot recover damages for his injury. Thesuperintendent who probably engaged the man is not his employer.Who is his employer? And whosenegligence could conceivably come in there? The board of directorsdid not tell the employee to use that piece of machinery; and thepresident of the corporation did not tell him to use that piece ofmachinery. And so forth. Don't you see by that theory that a mannever can get redress for negligence on the part of the employer?When I hear judges reason upon the analogy of the relationshipsthat used to exist between workmen and their employers a generationago, I wonder if they have not opened their eyes to the modernworld. You know, we have a right to expect that judges will havetheir eyes open, even though the law which they administer hasn'tawakened.
Narrator
On an afternoon in the spring of 1920, Woodrow Wilson, the President of the United States, was led through the White House. Wilson had suffered a devastating stroke.
Narrator
On an afternoon in the spring of 1920, Woodrow Wilson, the President of the United States, was led through the White House. Wilson had suffered a devastating stroke.
Unable to perform his duties, the President instead spent his time watching old newsreels that the secret service screened for him and friends like journalist Ray Baker.
Historian: Ray Stannard Baker
The moving picture machine behind us began to click and sputter. With the first brilliantly lighted episode, we were in another world. There we were, sailing grandly into the harbor at Brest. There was the President himself, smiling upon the bridge. By magic, we were transported to Paris. There he was again, driving down the most famous avenue in the world. And there was the President at Buckingham Palace with the King of England.
Narrator
The newsreels were testimony to the man Wilson had once been.
Historian: John Milton Cooper
Well I think there's no question that he was one of the five greatest Presidents in American history. He has that rare combination, which he shares with, certainly with Jefferson and with Lincoln. That is he was a tremendously effective, practical politician, and a very deep thinker.
Historian: David M. Kennedy
Woodrow Wilson laid out the contours of American foreign policy that has been followed for better or worse ever since. Every president since has to one degree or another been a Wilsonian.
Narrator
Wilson seemed cold and aloof in public, but in private he was deeply emotional.
Historian: Thomas Knock
Wilson really needed a companion, and a lover. The relationship between Ellen and Woodrow is probably the most romantic in Presidential history.
Author: Betty Boyd Caroli
He was very academic, those steel-rimmed glasses, he always seemed very serious, but he was an extremely passionate person.
Narrator
He cultivated a reputation as an intellectual who relied on hard facts, but Wilson's greatest source of guidance was his faith.
Historian: Louis Auchincloss
He believed that he was directed by God and he frequently said so. He thought that God had made him president of the United States.
Narrator
And yet the most important mission of Wilson's life, creating a League of Nations to spread democracy, ended in failure.
Historian: Jay Winter
He was a man who believed in this extraordinarily difficult goal and when he knew that he wouldn't get there the moment must have been devastating for him.
Narrator
It was during his fight for the league, that Wilson suffered the debilitating stroke. From that moment on, it was Wilson's wife who secretly performed many of the duties of the President.
Historian: Dr. Bert Park
No one really knew what was going on. The word stroke was never mentioned. Certainly the word paralyzed was never mentioned. And the American public was kept effectively in the dark
Narrator
On the banks of the Savannah River lies Augusta, Georgia. The night of May 14th, 1865, the President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, was brought through the town in chains, on his way to a Union prison. Many townspeople turned out to witness the somber spectacle. One was an eight year-old boy named Thomas Woodrow Wilson.
No event dominated Wilson's childhood like the Civil War. Nearly every family he knew had a relative killed or wounded. Now, as the president of the confederacy rolled past, crushed and defeated, young Tommy and everyone else who watched knew that life in the South could never be the same.
Historian: John Milton Cooper
The South, when Wilson was a boy, was the only part of the United States which has ever had a modern war. A modern total war. It had been ruined. The social structure had been just totally overturned. It's a completely overturned world. And especially for white folks, for better off white people, like the Wilson's, they've got to find a new way.
Narrator
In a land in ruins, the one institution left to pick up the pieces was the church. Tommy's father, Joseph Wilson, was a preacher at one of the most prominent congregations in the South.
Joseph Ruggles Wilson Come with me now, to lift up, after my manner, the fallen. Let us reinstate the righteous rule of the Father throughout the broken and disordered race to which you and I both belong.
Narrator
Joseph Wilson was a Presbyterian, who taught his son that God had put Christians into the world not to withdraw from it, but to make it a better place. He told Tommy that God wanted him to work tirelessly to help rebuild a country devastated by war.
Historian: Jay Winter
Growing up with a, a Presbyterian father would give a boy a sense that goodness isn't something that you measure in terms of your own personal behavior alone. Wilson's father would give him an idea that the true test was making the world a place where justice, where goodness had a better and bigger place than it had before he came on the scene. It's a difficult matter to live with, but it's one that once you get the stamp in your childhood you never lose it for the rest of your life.
Narrator
For all of his father's expectations, Tommy Wilson was not a promising student. At the age of ten, he still could not read. Some put it down to laziness, others to a lack of intelligence. But the real reason was far more complicated.
Historian: John Milton Cooper
As near as we can tell, young Tommy Wilson suffered from a form of dyslexia. Probably a mild form. And this is something that nobody knew existed in those days, the term wouldn't be, wouldn't even be coined until the middle of the Twentieth Century. Here's this difficulty, a lot of people in the family thought he was kind of slow, that this was not a very bright boy.
Narrator
"He was not like other boys," one neighbor said, "he had a queer way of going off alone."
With few friends, Tommy was deeply dependent on his relationship with his parents.
Historian: John Milton Cooper
His father never lost faith in him. It's very interesting. His father stuck with him. I think that may have had a lot to do with his being able to overcome dyslexia.
Narrator
Joseph Wilson was determined to compensate for his son's inability to read. He spent hour after hour with Tommy, drilling him in the art of debate and teaching him to perform the speeches of great orators like Daniel Webster.
Historian: John Morton Blum
His father was very important in directing Wilson towards serious use of English, with picking the precise word, speaking with eloquence, turning his attention to persuading people of his own ideas. And it was that kind of thing that captured the boy's fancy.
Narrator
His mother, Jessie, came from the Woodrows of Ohio, a well-educated, socially prominent family. Jessie did everything in her power to convince her son that he was capable of living up to the Woodrow family name.
Historian: John Milton Cooper
Tommy was Jessie Woodrow Wilson's favorite among all her children and she gave him a kind of supportive, uncritical love that I think made him strong and self-confident. For some reason or other, from a very, very early age, this is a person of tremendous self-confidence.
Narrator
When he was 16, Tommy heard about a new invention called shorthand. It was a way to bypass reading by using a "code" to record ideas on paper. Wilson practiced day after day until he had mastered it. With the boost shorthand gave his grades, he managed to gain admission to Princeton, one of the top schools in the country.
Tommy remained a slow reader. But he excelled in the areas where his real skills lay. He joined the debate team and after one victory, wrote to his father, "I have made a discovery, I have found that I have a mind.
Yet anyone observing Tommy Wilson would have thought he was majoring in baseball. As a boy he had written a detailed rulebook for the game. Now, he organized a pickup team called "The Bowery Boys." The boys played baseball every single day of the week, and sometimes twice.
Wilson's other passion was politics. He often got into arguments with his classmates over the legacy of the civil war. He believed it was time to withdraw northern troops and give control of the region back to white southerners.
"One night we sat up 'till dawn talking about it," a northern classmate said, "he taking the Southern side and getting quite bitter." Wilson wrote his parents that the taunts from northerners made him so angry he wanted to physically attack them.
The intense debates stoked Tommy's interest in a career in politics. He drilled himself daily in the art of oratory, so that, as he put it, "I would be able to lead others into my way of thinking."
Historian: John Morton Blum
Why did Wilson pick on politics and government? Well it was because he dreamed of becoming a major statesman, using politics to gain office and using office to persuade men about how to live and order their lives.
Narrator
To appear more distinguished, he began using his middle name, Woodrow, instead of Tommy. He even began handing out calling cards that said Woodrow Wilson, Senator.
Woodrow Wilson The first time I saw your face was in church one morning , in April, wasn't it? I remember thinking, "What a bright pretty face! What splendid laughing eyes! I'll lay a wager that this demure little lady has lots of life and fun in her!
Narrator
At 26, while attending church in Rome, Georgia, Wilson's eyes alighted on Ellen Axson, a minister's daughter.
Ellen was highly intelligent and a talented artist, whose work had won a medal at an exhibition in Paris.
Painting was a refuge from the harsh realities of her life. When Ellen was 21, her mother died, leaving her to care for 3 younger siblings. Then her father, who suffered from manic depression, was confined to a mental hospital, where he committed suicide.
All the while, Ellen clung to her dream of establishing an art school for women, which would enable her both to earn a living and pursue her art.
Ellen Axson It is possible that my talent for art, combined with my talent for work, might, after many years, win me a place among the first rank of American artists.
Historian: Betty Boyd Caroli
Well one of the things that amazes me most about Ellen Wilson was not just that she seems to have been an outstanding artist, even as a young woman, but she had the independence to follow up on it. She entered juried shows, she was represented by one of the outstanding agents in New York City. Her work was acquired by some of the outstanding museums in the country. And her oils of landscapes are outstanding I think. "Autumn" is the one that most people talk about. Even at the time that Woodrow met her, she certainly understood that she had artistic potential.
Narrator
A cousin said that if Ellen ever married, the man would probably be of no consequence, since smart men were rarely interested in women who were their intellectual equals.
But Woodrow Wilson was eager for the love and support of a strong woman like Ellen - and he began revealing a side of himself to her that few people ever saw.
Historian: Louis Auchincloss
Wilson very definitely gave the impression of being a cold fish, but he was a deeply passionate man. He was passionate in his relationship with women. He was passionate in his relationship with his god. All that came from a kind of much repressed but inward highly burning fire.
Historian: John Milton Cooper
Far from being a cold fish, far from being a, a thinking machine as he once joked that people thought he was, this was a very warm, passionate, in some ways hot man. I mean, he liked women, very, very much indeed.
Narrator
Wilson launched an all-out campaign to win Ellen's love. When she went to New York to paint, he wrote her letters nearly every day.
Woodrow Wilson Soon, I will come myself, to claim you, to take possession of you-of all the time and love you can give me; to take you in my arms and hold you. I tremble with a deep excitement when I think of it.
Historian: Betty Boyd Caroli
The letters he was writing to her were, were just filled with his love you know, with poetry, with expressions of how much she meant to him. It must have been, it must have swept her off her feet.
Narrator
In Woodrow, Ellen saw not only passion but ambition. Here was a young man who was determined to go places and she wanted to go with him.
Ellen Axson Suppose, it were as great a sacrifice to give up my art as even you imagine, my darling must know that it would be a pitiable price to pay for such a love as his.
Historian: Betty Boyd Caroli
In the time that Ellen Wilson married Woodrow, that's what a woman did. A woman who married put all of her energy to making a home for him, to making him happy, and Woodrow took a lot of work. He was a very demanding husband.
Narrator
Ten months after they were married, Ellen gave birth to a daughter, Margaret. Jessie and Nellie soon followed. Besides caring for her daughters, Ellen focused on Woodrow's career. From the start of their courtship, she had known of his dream of winning political office. But she also knew that it would be hard for a would-be politician to support a family.
The couple agreed that Woodrow should become a professor, instead. Wilson enrolled in graduate school at Johns Hopkins University. When his doctoral thesis was published it received glowing reviews in newspapers across the country.
America's federal government was dangerously weak, Wilson argued, and needed to be strengthened.
Historian: John Milton Cooper
He got fascinated with, how do politics really work, that was his one subject entirely, throughout his life was how does power really work and in turn, how can I wield it. Wilson wanted to wield power.
Narrator
When he was just 33, Wilson was offered a full professorship at his alma mater, Princeton. He became an enormously popular teacher-in seven out of eight years, he was voted favorite professor. "We came into contact with a mind rich with knowledge," one student said. "No one could touch him as a lecturer."
At the end of his classes, Wilson was often given a standing ovation.
Professor Wilson lectures addressed the growing gap between the have's and the have-nots in America in the early 1890's. Captains of industry like the Rockefellers, Carnegies and Morgans had become fabulously wealthy, while the majority of American workers lived in poverty.
Wilson was deeply influenced by a book of photographs by Jacob Riis, titled "How The Other Half Lives." Riis' photographs had created a national sensation, by exposing the squalor in which many Americans lived.
Historian: Victoria Bissell Brown
There had been economic and political inequity in this country certainly since the Civil War. The depression of 1894 however brought to the fore in glaring terms the level of inequity that existed. When you have a depression in which 20% of the American people are unemployed, thousands of businesses are going under, thousands of banks are going under, you have to begin to question whether this corporate elite is really running the show in the most equitable and wise fashion.
Narrator
Across the nation, rapidly growing populist and socialist movements were demanding real change. But the corporate elite refused to budge. Open warfare between strikers and union busters threatened to shut down factories and coal mines. Many feared that the nation was about to descend into chaos.
Professor Wilson was one of the few who had a practical solution: give America's government new power to rein in big business.
Historian: Thomas Knock
He came to the conclusion, that the government of the United States really did have to respond to these problems. That there was a kind of social compact between the people and the government, and working people were "the people." He was a bit fearful, also, that if neither of the major parties responded more forthrightly, then we were asking for bigger trouble down the road. If you didn't let some steam out at the pot, it's going to blow up in your face.
Narrator
Wilson articles in magazines like Harper's attracted nationwide attention and offers speak to political clubs and civic organizations began to pour in.
Woodrow Wilson Modern industry has so distorted competition as to put it into the power of some to tyrannize over many and enable the rich and strong to combine against the poor and weak.
Historian: Louis Auchincloss
He apparently had an extraordinary effect on audiences. And his voice was powerful and very moving. And I think when he spoke he put his whole heart and soul into it, enjoyed it very much. I think he's probably at his best when he spoke.
Narrator
Soon, a buzz began to spread about the eloquent Mr. Wilson. Before long, he was the most famous man at Princeton. Few were surprised when, at 46, he was named president of the college.
But Joseph Wilson believed that God had even greater plans for his son. "This is only the beginning of a very great career," he told all who would listen.
The family settled into the President's house at Princeton. Soon after, Joseph Wilson moved in, too. Each evening, Woodrow regaled his father with stories from his day and sought his advice.
Then, suddenly, Joseph became seriously ill. Woodrow spent every moment he could with him and sang him to sleep each night. On January 21st, 1903 Joseph Wilson died.
Woodrow Wilson It has quite taken the heart out of me to lose my life-long friend and companion. He is gone and a great loneliness is in my heart. No generation ahead of me now! I am in the firing line.
Narrator
The family would soon suffer another loss. When Ellen's youngest brother Eddie was ten, he had come to live with Woodrow and Ellen and they came to think of him as the son they never had. In the spring of 1905, Eddie, his wife and young son drowned.
Woodrow turned to his faith to see him through the loss. But Ellen was by nature more introspective - and she could not make sense out of a god who would allow such horrible things to happen.
Eddie's death sent Ellen into a long and deep depression. Woodrow found Ellen's dark mood disconcerting and urged her to begin painting again. But even her art could not brighten Ellen's disposition.
Ellen Wilson I cannot somehow shake off for a moment the weight it has laid upon my spirits, all the more so perhaps because, for Woodrow's sake, I must not show it. He is almost terribly dependent on me to keep up his spirits and to "rest" him, as he says. If I become just for a moment blue, then he becomes blue black.
Narrator
As a girl, Ellen had been devastated by her father's depression. For the sake of her own daughters, she began making every effort to resume a normal life.
During his early years as President of Princeton, Wilson continued to receive invitations from around the nation to speak about political reform. "He was time and again overwhelmed with applause," the Baltimore Sun wrote, " and had to wait until the clapping ceased to be heard again."
Harper's Monthly declared that Wilson was a man the nation would do well to pay attention to. By any measure, the Princeton President's star was on the rise.
Then, on the morning of May 28, 1906, the Wilson household was thrown into panic. Woodrow awoke to discover that that he had lost sight in one eye. Ellen rushed him to the hospital, where doctors discovered that the blood vessels behind Wilson's left eye had hemorrhaged.
Back home, Nellie and her sisters waited anxiously for news of their father's condition.
Nellie Wilson We were at the door waiting when they returned. Father was calm, but after one look at mother's face, we knew that something dreadful had happened. Not until father had gone upstairs did she tell us that the doctor's verdict was that he must give up all his work and live a retired life. Worst of all, there was no assurance that he would ever again regain his health completely. It is impossible to describe the panic and despair that engulfed us.
Narrator
The hemorrhage had been caused by a severe case of hypertension or high blood pressure.
Historian: Dr. Bert Park
Here is a man who's 49 years old, relatively young, who already has a, an advanced disease. By the time we reach 1906 this disease process has already been ongoing for at least a decade. Simply because you don't get this type of finding unless the disease has been hanging around for a long time. The problem is that it then begins to affect other organ systems. If it's left untreated, you're talking about the heart, the kidneys and most significantly the brain. And the potential for that is catastrophic ultimately.
Narrator
In 1906, the only known treatment for hypertension was rest. His doctor recommended that Wilson retire if he wished to live.
Wilson decided to take a leave from Princeton and go to Britain to recuperate. He began a strict regime of exercise, walking farther and farther each day until he was hiking up to 14 miles across the English countryside. With his sight returned and his health improved, he began to ponder his faith and his future.
Historian: John Morton Blum
The Presbyterian faith meant a great deal to Wilson from the time that he was first conscious of an idea through the rest of his life. He was a Calvinist in fact. And always a Calvinist, secure in the knowledge that he was one of the elect one of God's agents, he thought, on this earth.
Narrator
By the end of his stay in Britain, Wilson had become convinced that he had not yet fulfilled God's plan for him. He decided that he would devote himself to transforming Princeton, even if it meant risking his health.
Woodrow Wilson College should not be-as many think it is-a playground for the sons of very rich men, for they are not as apt to form definite and serious purposes, as are those who know they must whet their whits for the struggle of life.
Narrator
With the rise of a new class of fabulously wealthy Americans, Princeton had become a place where the sons of the rich could gain a bit of culture, without having to expend too much effort-a kind of country club.
Now, Wilson wanted to change all that. He proposed building a world-class graduate school in the center of campus to train the next generation of American leaders.
To help attract serious scholars, he planned to abolish Princeton's fraternity like eating-clubs, filled with the schools richest and laziest students.
But Princeton's wealthy alumni were outraged by Wilson's attacks on their son's beloved clubs and threatened to withhold their donations.
Rather than try to work out a compromise, Wilson declared war.
Historian: John Morton Blum
Wilson had never found opposition easy to handle. He had this extraordinary confidence that his was the right, that he was the special vehicle of the Lord, that he spoke the truth, so that opposition became almost in that definition sacrilegious.
Historian: Jay Winter
After all Calvinism was based upon a hatred of the gaudy riches and laziness of the Catholic church. None of that for Woodrow Wilson at Princeton. Wilson's education was moral as much as it was intellectual.
Narrator
Over the next four years, Wilson spent a great deal of time fighting the alumni, but little time building the support he needed. Eventually, his graduate school was built, but far from the main campus. The "upper-crust" eating clubs remained at the center of university social life.
Gradually, Wilson came to bitterly resent those who had opposed him.
Woodrow Wilson Certainly this is the same place to a stick that I knew four years ago, but I have changed much more than it has. I am constantly confronted by specimens of the sort I like least: restless, rich, empty-headed people. I am glad to see them disappear into the distance, but very resentful that I must have their dust in my nostrils. They and their kind are my worst enemies.
Narrator
Wilson became so frustrated that he began to think the time had come to leave Princeton and the job that had suited him so well.
Ellen Wilson was responsible for a household of ten at Princeton - including her own daughters, a niece of Woodrow's and her own adult sister and brother. Her brother Stockton was the most demanding, for he suffered from the family curse of manic depression.
During one of Stockton's breakdowns, Ellen revealed her burdens to a friend.
Ellen Wilson I used to think it didn't matter if you gave way, if no one knew. But now, I do not dare to give way a minute. Both Stockton and Woodrow need me to be strong all the time.
Narrator
But the wear and tear of always needing to be strong for others made it difficult for Ellen to be the lively companion that Woodrow craved.
To keep her husband happy, she began staging parties where Woodrow could banter with her more spirited female friends. But for Woodrow, Ellen's parties were not enough.
He decided to take a break from his battles at Princeton and go to Bermuda. Ellen stayed home to look after Stockton and her daughters.
In Bermuda, Wilson met a witty, outgoing socialite named Mary Peck.
Historian: Betty Boyd Caroli
Woodrow Wilson was an academic with a Ph.D., who was used to being around academics, and politicians. And in walks Mary Peck, who's vivacious, beautiful, and flirtatious. I think she says something like, because he did not smoke, or skate, or swim, he was drawn to women like me who did.
Narrator
Peck introduced Wilson to her friend Mark Twain and invited Woodrow to play golf with them. Afterward, Peck invited Wilson to her home, though she too was married.
As they enjoyed the pleasures of Bermuda together, Wilson felt himself drawn more and more to her.
Woodrow Wilson There were hours when I lost all of the abominable self-consciousness that has been my bane all my life, and felt perfectly at ease. Happily myself. God was very good to me to send me such a friend, so perfectly satisfying and delightful. So delectable.
Historian: John Milton Cooper
She was a lovely, sympathetic, interesting person, interesting woman. Something happened there. Some kind of love affair began between the two of them. We don't know how far it went. Probably rather far, just given Wilson's own rather passionate nature.
Narrator
When Wilson returned home, he and Mary continued to write