When Woodrow Wilson arrived in Paris in December 1918 for the post-World War I Peace Conference, he was a man sitting on top of the world. After finally bringing his country into the conflict on the side of the Allies, the American President mobilized the full power of the United States toward defeating the Central Powers and delivered on that promise in a little more than a year. Millions of grateful citizens showed up in France, England, and Italy to cheer at the top of their lungs the man who appeared to save western civilization as they knew it. Moreover, many of the revelers were enamored with his vision to create new structures, like his proposed League of Nations, to ensure no such conflagrations would ever happen again. Such was the apex in the life and career of Woodrow Wilson. It was also mostly downhill from there.
Wilson made many compromises that deviated from his original Fourteen Points, on which the peace talks were supposed to be based, to get the Allies to agree to his League, which was the most important part of the plan in the eyes of the American President. But many of those ideological concessions represented major disappointments to Wilson’s adherents, and had devastating consequences when the punitive Treaty of Versailles was put into effect. Moreover, when Wilson returned home with the Treaty in hand, he ran into fervent opposition in a United States Senate that he had mostly ignored throughout the negotiations. Wilson badly misread the need to engage these legislators until it was too late. Both sides stubbornly locked into a take-it-or-leave-it mentality, which ultimately meant defeat for Wilson. His own country would never join his beloved League.
Wilson never gave up fighting for his vision, and that cost him as well. Always frail, and with a history of physical setbacks, Wilson took his case directly to the American people in a grueling campaign-style speaking tour for which he was not up to the task. His oratory was as brilliant as always as he rose to the occasion to speak, but after each address, his body continued to break down, eventually succumbing to a massive stroke. He spent the last year and a half of his presidency as an invalid, watching his precious League of Nations go down to defeat not once but twice in the Senate. In the meantime, his wife assumed the role of deciding which few items she would bring to Wilson’s attention in the longest period in American history where the President was primarily unable to function. … Wilson was ultimately unable to deliver on many of his most profound ideas. The fact that an even more devastating war materialized less than a generation into the future served as the ultimate repudiation of Woodrow Wilson’s greatest efforts.