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Wilson prevailed in the 1916 election, becoming the first Democrat to win a second consecutive term since Andrew Jackson. His narrow victory by 277 to 254 electoral votes over Charles Evans Hughes, the nominee of the reunited and resurgent Republicans, was a great political feat. The campaign cry “He kept us out of war” helped, but Wilson’s domestic record on progressive and labor issues played the biggest part in his achieving a healthy plurality in the popular vote and a small electoral margin.

His reelection assured, Wilson mounted a peace offensive in December 1916 and January 1917 aimed at ending the world war. First he made a public diplomatic appeal to the belligerent countries to state their peace terms and accept American mediation, and then on January 22 he gave a stirring speech in which he called for a “peace without victory” and pledged to establish a league of nations to prevent future wars.

However the Germans rendered Wilson’s peace efforts moot by unleashing their submarines on February 1. For the next two months Wilson agonized over how to respond. Public opinion remained divided and uncertain, even after publication of the Zimmermann Telegram, a secret communication by the German foreign secretary that offered Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to Mexico in return for going to war against the United States. Wilson finally decided to intervene, mainly because he could see no alternative and hoped to use American belligerency as a means to build a just, lasting peace. On April 2, 1917, he went before Congress to ask for a declaration of war so that the United States could strive to fulfill his injunction that “the world must be made safe for democracy.”

Wilson proved to be a surprisingly effective war president. Recognizing what he did not know, he delegated military decisions to professional soldiers, particularly Gen. John J. Pershing, who commanded the American Expeditionary Force in France, and economic mobilization to such men as Bernard Baruch, William Gibbs McAdoo, and Herbert Hoover. Careful planning also ensured the success of the Selective Service Act (see Selective Service Acts), which became law in May. This helped to raise the strength of the armed forces to five million men and women, two million of whom reached France by the war’s end. The boost given to the Allies by American money, supplies, and manpower tipped the scales against the Germans, who sued for peace and laid down their arms with the Armistice of November 11, 1918.

On the home front, once the United States had entered the war, there was little tolerance for dissent. During the war Congress passed the Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918), laws that allowed the federal government to prosecute individuals who criticized the war effort or interfered with military recruitment. Critics argued that these measures were overly broad and violated constitutional protections of free speech. U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer brutally suppressed dissent. The overzealous hounding of radical groups, immigrants, and dissidents both during the war and in the Red Scare of 1919–20 was justified on grounds of national security but was condemned by civil libertarians and ultimately discredited.

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It was during this period when Wilson, who had been an opponent of extending voting rights to women, had a change of heart on the topic of suffrage. During his 1912 campaign for the presidency, Wilson made abundantly clear that he was “irreconcilably opposed to woman suffrage” and that a “woman’s place was in the home, and the type of woman who took an active part in the suffrage agitation was totally abhorrent.” But by 1918, after seeing the work that women did in support of the war effort and recognizing that Great Britain and other war allies had granted the vote to women, Wilson’s transformation was complete. “Are we alone to ask and take the utmost that our women can give—service and sacrifice of every kind—and still say we do not see what title that gives them?” he asked members of Congress who opposed the Nineteenth Amendment. Congress passed the legislation in 1919, and the next year—in time for the presidential election of 1920—the Nineteenth Amendment had been ratified.

Diplomacy was the one job that Wilson kept to himself. He seized the initiative on war aims with his Fourteen Points speech of January 8, 1918, in which he promised a liberal, nonpunitive peace and a league of nations. Wilson believed that lasting peace required a new international system based on principles such as national self-determination, open diplomacy, and collective security through an international organization.

Determined to keep those promises, Wilson made the controversial decision to go in person to the Paris Peace Conference, where he spent seven months in wearying, often acrimonious negotiations with the British, French, and Italians. The final product, the Treaty of Versailles, was signed on June 28, 1919. The treaty’s financial and territorial terms severely compromised Wilson’s aims, but those were offset by its inclusion of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which he believed would adjust international differences and maintain peace.

Wilson returned from the peace conference exhausted and in failing health, in no shape to face the biggest fight of his career. Republican senators, led by Henry Cabot Lodge, sought either to reject the treaty or to attach reservations that would gravely limit America’s commitments to the League of Nations. Lodge and other senators argued that membership in the League might limit Congress’s constitutional authority to declare war and could draw the United States into foreign conflicts without congressional approval.

After two months of frustrating talks with senators, Wilson took his case to the people in September 1919 in the hope of shaping public opinion on this important issue of the day. A master of the English language and public oratory, he threw himself into a whirlwind cross-country tour, giving 39 speeches in three weeks.

The strain, both mental and physical, was too much for him. He had a near breakdown on September 25, after which his doctor canceled the rest of the tour and rushed him back to Washington. On October 2, 1919, Wilson suffered a massive stroke that left him partially paralyzed on his left side and partly blind in his right eye, and his judgment was impaired.

This was the worst crisis of presidential disability in American history, and it was handled badly. No one seriously suggested that Wilson resign. His wife, Edith, controlled access to him, made decisions by default, and engineered a cover-up of his condition, which included misleadingly optimistic reports from his doctors. Wilson never again fully functioned as president.

The peace treaty went down to defeat in the Senate, as a consequence of Wilson’s stroke-induced rigidity. He demanded that Democratic senators spurn all efforts at compromise with Lodge and the Republicans. Twice, on November 19, 1919, and March 19, 1920, the Treaty of Versailles failed to gain the two-thirds vote necessary for ratification. Later, under Warren G. Harding, Wilson’s Republican successor, the United States made a separate peace with Germany, something Wilson had believed “would place ineffable stain upon the gallantry and honor of the United States.” The United States never joined the League of Nations.

In the 1920 election Wilson called for “a great and solemn referendum” on the treaty and the League of Nations and entertained fantasies about running on that issue himself. Edith Wilson and his closest friends quietly scotched those notions. Instead, the Democrats nominated James M. Cox, the governor of Ohio, on the strength of his lack of association with Wilson, although an administration loyalist, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, received the vice presidential nomination. The election did become a referendum on Wilson, as Harding called for a return to “normalcy” and blamed all the country’s troubles on the man in the White House. The Republicans won a landslide victory, which they interpreted as a mandate to reverse Wilson’s progressive policies at home and his internationalism abroad.