Wilson's 14 Points
Biography of Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson was the twenty-eighth president of the United States. He was in power from 1913 to 1921. He was born in Virginia in 1856. He graduated from Princeton and later became a professor of political science there and it’s president. He also attended the University of Virginia Law School and John Hopkins University. He married Ellen Louise Axson.
His election campaign was based on keeping America out of the war. But after being elected president he asked Congress to declare war on Germany. That was on April 2, 1917. In January 1918 he presented the Fourteen Points in front of Congress. These were the American War Aims, in other words why America was no longer staying neutral in the war. He said it would establish “A general association of nations...affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.” He wanted peace. Woodrow Wilson is the one who presented the Treaty of Versailles to the American Senate. The Senate rejected it. Woodrow Wilson would not accept this and went on a national tour to promote this treaty, against doctor’s orders. He should have listened to his doctor because while touring he almost died from a stroke caused by exhaustion. His second wife nursed him back to health until he died in 1924.
THE FOURTEEN POINTS:
I. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind... diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.
II. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas... alike in peace and war....
III. The removal... of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations.
IV. Adequate guarantees... that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.
V. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined....
VI. The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all question affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest co-operation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an... opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development.... VII. Belgium... must be evacuated and restored, without any attempt to limit the sovereignty which she enjoys....
VIII. All French territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored, and the wrong done to France by Prussia [Germany] in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be righted....
IX. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy... along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.
X. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous development.
XI. Romania, Serbia and Montenegro should be evacuated; occupied territory restored... the relations of the several Balkan states to one another determined by friendly consul along historically established lines of allegiance and nationality; and international guarantees of the political and economic independence and territorial integrity of the several Balkan states....
XII. The Turkish portions of the Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development....
XIII. An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations... whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed....
XIV. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenant for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.
Resource: Wilson's 14 Points
A School Link Article. Courtesy of Joelle Helik, LCCHS, February 26,1999 .
