Why Woodrow Wilson Rejected the Declaration of Independence—Explicitly
President Woodrow Wilson speaks at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall on July 4, 1914
(Alamy Stock Photo)
By Christopher Cox
This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.
On July 4, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson spoke at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall to mark the 138th anniversary of the birth of the United States. Wilson asked his audience, “Have you ever read the Declaration of Independence…with close comprehension?” He wanted to know whether they had focused on “the real character of it.”
That character, he said, was not to be found in the famous preamble, which set forth the idea that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Instead, Wilson lectured, the discerning reader would “pass beyond those preliminary passages,” because the famous “quote about the rights of men” was not “the heart of the document.”
Wilson had dismissed the Declaration’s preamble before. In a speech and subsequent magazine article in 1907, when he was president of Princeton University, he acknowledged that the Declaration “does indeed open with the assertion that all men are equal.” But he maintained that “Mr. Jefferson and his colleagues in the Continental Congress” spoke “for no generation but their own.” We in modern times, he said, “are not bound to adhere to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence.” Every generation should “determine afresh what principles, what forms of power we think most likely to effect our safety and happiness.”
Four years later, as the newly elected governor of New Jersey with an eye on the White House, Wilson delivered his interpretation of the Declaration even more bluntly. Speaking to the Jefferson Club in Los Angeles, he warned his audience to ignore Jefferson’s stirring opening. The Declaration, Wilson claimed, is better understood if one simply excises its first two paragraphs. These words comprise merely a “rhetorical introduction,” he said. They are “the least part of it.” Wilson concluded, “If you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the preface.”
THE DRED SCOTT ARGUMENT
In scorning the Declaration’s preamble, Wilson echoed long-standing southern Democratic rationalizations for denying voting rights to Black people.
The Supreme Court’s notorious Dred Scott decision (1857), issued only months after Wilson’s birth, had downplayed Jefferson’s opening passage. In that case’s majority opinion, Chief Justice Roger Taney waved away what he disparagingly called “the brief preamble.” He conceded that the “general words…would seem to embrace the whole human family” but then pounced on the fact that the Declaration does not define with precision “who shall be regarded…as one of the people.” By preemptively deciding that Black men and women were “beings of an inferior order,” the Taney Court read them out of the Declaration’s promise.
Wilson did the same, even though the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution had rendered the Dred Scott decision a dead letter. Wilson was a son of the South, born in Virginia and raised in Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina during the Civil War and Reconstruction. To him, “men” meant white men, specifically the white men he called “Aryans,” especially those of Anglo-Saxon stock. So he wrote in his 1898 textbook on government, The State.
Wilson firmly opposed allowing the people he derided as “ignorant negroes” to cast ballots. In his History of the American People, published in the year he became president of Princeton, he maintained that giving “the negro political power in order that he might defend his own rights” had paved the way “for the ruin of the South.”
For most of his career, Wilson also opposed giving women the right to vote. Because he dismissed the Declaration’s preamble out of hand, he did not bother to argue that the phrase “all men are created equal” should be interpreted to exclude women.
As Wilson the historian surely knew, prominent Americans had long affirmed that the Declaration’s reference to “all men” covered the whole human race. On the heels of the Dred Scott decision in 1857, Abraham Lincoln condemned the Taney Court “for doing this obvious violence to the plain unmistakable language of the Declaration.” He explained that the “authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men,” concluding, “This they said, and this meant.” Calvin Coolidge used nearly the same language seven decades later, when he announced, “If all men are created equal, that is final.”
EMBRACING SEGREGATION
Wilson’s cramped view of the Declaration’s preamble had baleful consequences for the country. During his 1912 campaign for the White House, Wilson opposed the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, which would guarantee women’s voting rights nationwide. That April, fellow Democrat Edward Taylor assailed Wilson’s argument on the floor of Congress. “Let us show to the world that we believe in the Declaration of Independence,” Representative Taylor countered. The idea that men and women are not similarly possessed of unalienable rights, he maintained, was worthy only of “the partisan, the prejudiced, the biased, and smaller minds that have always desperately opposed any advance of womanhood.” Taylor called the argument a “disgrace.”
Nonetheless, Wilson’s 42 percent of the vote was enough to win the presidential race that year after his closest rival, former president and Anthony Amendment supporter Theodore Roosevelt, split a majority of the popular vote with incumbent president William Howard Taft. Wilson was equally fortunate four years later, when the contest came down to California. In the Golden State, where women had been voting since 1911, antiwar sentiment ran high. Wilson’s peace campaign helped him eke out a victory by only 3,421 votes—just enough to keep his Republican opponent, Anthony Amendment supporter Charles Evans Hughes, out of the White House.
During that 1916 contest, Wilson confessed in a private meeting with four Democratic women that the states’ rights argument he had consistently made against the Anthony Amendment was not the real reason for his opposition. One of the women in the meeting, Harriot Stanton Blatch—the daughter of the famous suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton—asked him point-blank whether he could support the Anthony Amendment. Wilson replied that he could not. “Dismiss from your minds the idea that my party or I are concerned about states’ rights,” Wilson told her. “It is the negro question, Mrs. Blatch, that keeps my party from doing as you wish.”
Wilson knew the Anthony Amendment contained express authorization for federal voting rights enforcement. That would pose a direct threat to Jim Crow, and therefore to Democratic rule in the South. It was Wilson’s conviction that the white men of the South should never be subjected to the rule of Black people.
Beginning immediately after taking office in 1913, Wilson segregated the federal workforce, which had been integrated since Reconstruction. Suddenly, restrooms were designated “colored” and “white.” Makeshift screens were erected to separate Black employees from their colleagues, splitting previously integrated offices and dining rooms in two. In a 2021 study of civil service records, the National Bureau of Economic Research found “segregation of the entire federal civil service under President Woodrow Wilson.”
Civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter met with Wilson in the White House to complain. “For fifty years, white and colored clerks have been working together in peace and harmony and friendliness,” Trotter emphasized. Wilson patronizingly explained that “segregation [is in] the best interests of both races in order to overcome friction.” Wilson’s decision was in harmony with his preference for reading equality before the law out of the Declaration of Independence.
LAST STAND FOR JIM CROW
With time running out in his second and final presidential term, Wilson abruptly switched his position on the Anthony Amendment. The sudden reversal came the night before two-thirds of the House of Representatives voted to approve it. A dozen House Democrats, including the chairman of the Woman Suffrage Committee, John Raker of California, had urgently requested a meeting with him in hopes of getting some statement of support. Public support for the amendment ran high, and House Republican leaders were reporting that more than 80 percent of their members favored passage. Democrats in Congress worried what it would look like if the leader of their party were caught sitting on the sidelines.
Even in the face of their entreaties, Wilson offered only the most limited endorsement. He refused to release a statement of his own. Instead, he allowed the visiting congressmen to issue a single sentence stating that the president had recommended they vote in favor.
No one in the White House issued a statement on Wilson’s behalf, even after the successful House vote. All press inquiries were refused. Despite continued pleas, Wilson did not speak publicly in favor of the Anthony Amendment for another nine months. He finally broke his silence the day before the Senate voted on it.
In that speech, Wilson seemed at last to embrace the vision stated so clearly in the Declaration’s preamble, that “all men”—meaning humanity—were to be equal under the law. He pledged his support for “equality of suffrage for the women of the country.” And when he spoke of “the people,” as he did repeatedly in these brief remarks, he seemed to mean all of them.
But after the Anthony Amendment fell just short of the necessary two-thirds in the Senate, it became clear that the president’s conception of “the people” still excluded many. He endorsed a rewrite of the language that had been introduced unchanged in every Congress since 1878. The new language aimed to satisfy southern Democrats by eliminating federal enforcement of women’s voting rights. This change, its principal author explained, “would ensure that states could extend the franchise to white women only.”
THE FORCE OF LAW
Fortunately for posterity, this last-ditch attempt to rewrite the Anthony Amendment failed at the end of the Sixty-Fifth Congress. When the new Congress opened in March 1919, supermajorities in both Houses passed the Anthony Amendment in its original, unadulterated form. The states ratified it in time for the 1920 presidential election.
At last, at the dawn of the third decade of the twentieth century, the Declaration’s stirring preamble achieved constitutional force through voting rights guarantees that extended to all the people. And yet, for millions of women and men of color who continued to live under Jim Crow, even those explicit guarantees would remain unfulfilled for decades to come.
Christopher Cox is the author of Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn. He chaired the Securities and Exchange Commission and served in the elected leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives.
This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.