Woodrow Wilson's western tour

"On September 3, 1919, Woodrow Wilson embarked upon one of the most ambitious and controversial speaking tours in the history of American politics: a grueling 8,000-mile, twenty-two-day tour across the Midwest and Far West in support of the League of Nations. Historians still debate Wilson's motivations for touring in the first place, but most agree with Thomas Bailey that the tour proved a "disastrous blunder." Not only did Wilson collapse before completing his "swing around the circle," but the treaty likely would have been defeated even if the tour had succeeded beyond all expectations. Most agree that Wilson's decision to tour was misguided - the product of an exaggerated sense of his own persuasiveness, a martyr complex, or even mental illness." "In this work, J. Michael Hogan offers the first detailed analysis of Wilson's speeches on the tour, including the most celebrated speech of the campaign, his famous address in Pueblo, Colorado. Assessing the tour in light of Wilson's own scholarly writings about civic discourse and democratic deliberation, Hogan provides new insight into Wilson's failure and a new understanding of this watershed event in the history of American public