Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson’s place in Harry S. Truman’s life was marked by a sharp contrast: Truman revered him as a great Democratic president and drew inspiration from his wartime messages, but the surviving evidence gives little indication that he followed Wilson’s public career closely. Wilson entered Truman’s story as a figure of political admiration, then as a voice associated with the war, and finally as a president whose continuing work in France seemed to delay the homecoming Truman longed for.

Political Admiration and the War’s Arrival

The only exception Truman’s letters made to their intensely personal focus was the 1912 presidential contest. Wilson’s election mattered to him as the victory of the first Democrat to win the presidency since Grover Cleveland, and Truman regarded Wilson as a great man. That interest did not develop into sustained attention to national affairs. When the First World War began, German troops crossed into Belgium at Liege, and the armies advanced through Belgium into France as far as the Marne River. Newspapers filled with war news, but Truman’s letters to Bess Wallace said nothing about the conflict. Even after his grief over his father had eased, the world beyond his immediate life rarely claimed his written attention.

The silence in the letters is especially striking because Truman had a sense of history, admired military heroes, and had served in the National Guard. The book does not portray him as having anticipated the war or as having responded to its first headlines with a settled political view. Instead, its account distinguishes between the quiet private record and the conviction he later described: that Wilson’s messages had stirred him, and that he felt “we owed France something for Lafayette.” For Truman, the war eventually became a noble undertaking overseas, a cause that made service seem both necessary and personally formative.

Wilson’s Wartime Appeal to Truman

When Truman explained why he volunteered, he recalled several motives shared by many American men of the period. He disliked guns, had never fought, and had not previously risked his life, but he saw military service as “a job somebody had to do.” He did not want to be a slacker; he thought the experience would make a man of him; and he believed the war would soon end once the United States entered it. Among these reasons, he singled out the effect of Wilson’s war messages: they had left him “stirred heart and soul.” Wilson’s public language thus belonged to the emotional setting in which Truman understood his decision, even though the earlier correspondence gives no sign that he had closely followed the war as it unfolded.

That idealism coexisted with a vivid attachment to home. During training in France, Truman attended Sunday services at a Catholic church without understanding the service, and concluded that France was a grand place for Frenchmen, whom he did not blame for fighting for it. He was willing to help them, but wrote that he was “for helping them, but give me America, Missouri and Jackson County for mine with the finest girl in the world at the county seat.” The declaration locates his loyalties in two places at once: he accepted the cause Wilson’s messages had helped make compelling, while his imagination remained anchored in Missouri and in Bess.

From the Armistice to the Long Wait

The armistice brought relief after the strain of artillery service. Truman wrote that the continual dropping of shells had left his nerves tightly strung by the morning of November 11, 1918, and described the order to cease firing as the most agreeable sigh of relief he had experienced. The war was over, but the statesmen still had to make a lasting peace. Less than a month later, Woodrow Wilson sailed for France aboard the SS George Washington, the same ship that had carried Truman and thousands of other American soldiers across the Atlantic.

For the troops still waiting to go home, Wilson’s continued presence in France took on a different meaning from the idealism associated with his wartime messages. Truman wished “Woodie” would stop “gallivanting” there and leave, so American soldiers could depart as well. He told Ethel Noland that saving the world no longer mattered to most of them; the political fate of Russia and the behavior of distant rulers seemed irrelevant beside the immediate question of returning home. This impatience did not erase his earlier account of the war as a noble cause. It shows instead how thoroughly the soldiers’ priorities had changed once the fighting ended: the language of a world-saving mission gave way to exhaustion, separation, and the practical wait for transport.

Truman’s own return made that wait concrete. In Paris he saw Wilson ride past and bought a wedding ring; afterward, on the homeward voyage, he was violently seasick for nearly the whole crossing. He wrote that he could bear any agony given the direction the ship was heading. Wilson’s journey to France and Truman’s journey away from it therefore frame opposite movements in the aftermath of war: one toward the unfinished work of peace, the other toward home and marriage.

Narrative Significance

Wilson’s appearances trace the distance between public ideals and private experience without making Truman’s response simply one of admiration or disillusionment. In 1912, Wilson represented a Democratic victory and personal greatness; during the war, his messages helped give Truman’s service a sense of purpose; after the armistice, his stay in France became, in Truman’s eyes, part of the delay keeping soldiers from home. The shifts are grounded in the changing circumstances of Truman’s own life rather than in a sustained portrait of Wilson’s policies.

The account also emphasizes what Truman’s letters leave out. At the war’s outbreak, the world crisis barely enters his correspondence; later, he could describe the force of Wilson’s appeals and the idealism they stirred. That difference makes Wilson’s role in the narrative intermittent but consequential: a distant public voice helps name the cause for which Truman goes abroad, while the postwar wait reveals the limits of such large purposes when set against the soldier’s longing for Missouri, Bess, and a life resumed.