Top Highlights

• Soon after the March Revolution feminists urged Wilson to follow the Russian example of enfranchising women.
• Wilson declared that “the day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by,” proclaimed that the world had to be made safe for peace-loving nations to determine their own institutions, and announced that in the future diplomacy should “proceed always frankly and in the public view.”3
• Long before he became president, Wilson believed that the great issues of politics, especially the questions of peace and war, involved elements that would be visible only to the few—“the selected leaders of public opinion.”
• Wilson’s deep conviction that enlightened statesmen would judge more wisely than the broad masses of the people led him to consider incomplete candor and perhaps even deliberate deception justified.
• Many of Wilson’s presidential advisors consequently found that he was “secretive of nature.”