The professor-president who took a neutral America into the war and then crossed the ocean with a plan, self-determination, open diplomacy, a League of Nations, and came home to a Senate that refused it.
The fork
1917. Re-elected on 'He kept us out of war', he asks for war five months later, and decides America's price will be a peace written to his principles: the Fourteen Points of January 1918.
What they wanted
A world of nations under law, with America as its moral leader. He will not compromise with the senators who could have ratified it.
What it cost
At home he segregated the federal civil service, and his government jailed dissenters under the Espionage Act. Abroad, self-determination stopped at the colour line, as the Koreans, Egyptians and Indians who quoted him in 1919 discovered. A stroke in October 1919 leaves him a shadow in the White House.
The fight
Visionary or self-defeating moralist? His League failed in the Senate; his ideas outlived him in the United Nations. The argument now is how much of the failure was his own stubbornness.