After Wilson died on this day in 1924, The Nation’s editor, Oswald Garrison Villard—who had championed Wilson for the presidency shortly after his gubernatorial victory in 1910—published this obituary, “Woodrow Wilson—A Supreme Tragedy.” Whereas in 1912 Villard preferred Wilson to the more radical Theodore Roosevelt, running for a third term on the
Progressive ticket, by the end he was disillusioned that Wilson’s presidency had not brought about the revolution of the downtrodden he thought had been promised.
Woodrow Wilson came into the political life of America as if in response to prayer. It was given to him as to no other to step suddenly out of a cloistered life into high office. Then, as today, there was profound distrust of those conducting the government; startling revelations had laid bare both the corruption in big business and the control of the government by those in the seats of the commercial mighty. Neither the spurious liberalism nor the halfway, compromising reforms of Theodore Roosevelt, with his incessant knocking-down of men of straw, had satisfied the thoughtful or cut deeply into our political sores. To Mr. Wilson, as he once remarked in the office of The Nation during his governorship, what the country needed was “a modified Rooseveltism”; what he preached was not only that, but a far greater vision of reform, with a far keener and truer analysis of what was wrong.
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