Let me preface this with that I don't know a lot about Wilson.
I know he was a segregationist and was quoted in the introduction to Birth of a Nation, and that certainly doesn't endear me to him. But what I like about him is that I associate him with the high tide of progressivism (the income tax amendment; the FTC, the Clayton Antitrust Act, child labor laws, and yes even the Federal Reserve). I think the US entry into WWI, while not entirely necessarily, was not heinous either, may have helped to shorten the war and more than anything else pushed the US into superpower status. And while he failed to get the US into the League of Nations or negotiate a more sustainable Treaty of Versailles, I blame the latter on British and French vindictiveness and the former on his opponents in the Senate. I think the League of Nations overall as a concept was vindicated by the UN.
His first term wasn't too bad (bar the racial segregation of government departments) but you are far too kind about his second.
He basically threw civil liberties to the winds during WW1, allowing dissenters like Debs to be savagely sentenced. In doing so he killed his League of Nations before it was born, since the Progressive elements who might have supported him were crushed and demoralise. As one of them put it, he had "put his enemies in office and his friends in jail". The superpatriotic binge to which the war gave rise would continue far into peacetime in the shape of the Ku Klux Klan. He also tolerated strikebreaking and persecution of Labour Unions on the excuse that their activities "hampered the war effort".
As for Britain and France, no doubt they weren't saintly, but that hardly came as a surprise. Look up Wilson's speeches of Dec 1916 and Jan 1917, when he observed that there was little to choose between the two sides in the European War. He allied with them knowing perfectly well what they were, and had no right at all to be surprised at how the Peace Conference turned out. Iirc he had himself said that a decisive victory for either side would be disastrous, and yet he played a leading role in bringing about that precise result.
Re the Senate, if he wanted their co-operation, shouldn't he have paid them a bit more attention when drawing up the League Covenant, rather than just doing it all himself and demanding that they rubber stamp it? He behaved, in fact, much like Andrew Johnson in 1865,trying to push through his own peace plan and totally ignoring the views of Congress. In both cases, the Presidents got exactly what their behaviour invited - a size 24 steel toed boot right in the chops.
Incidentally, where do you find any evidence that US intervention shortened WW1? During 1917 things were going so badly for the Entente that they might well have sought a compromise peace but for the prospect of American resources. As it was, the former man of peace turned into a bellicose hawk and contemptuously dismissed the Pope's peace note of Summer 1917, and forbade American Socialists to attend the Stockholm Conference. So much for Peace Without Victory.
The US, btw, was already a superpower before WW1, though Europe hadn't really noticed yet. By about 1912 its annual steel production had overtaken that of all the Euriopean powers combined. The World Wars did not bring about America's superpower status, but merely called attention to it.
On women's suffrage he may have been some help, but more by his party affiliation than anything. Support for it was strogeest among Republicans, of whom only 19 Representatives and eight Senators voted against the 19th Amendment. By contrast, 70 Democratic Congressmen and 17 Senators voted nay. So Wilson's support may have won it the narrow (56-25) margin by which it passed the Senate. However, his principle rivals in 1912, Champ Clark and WJ Bryan, would also have supported it, probably with the same result. In any event, the Harding landslide, which vastly strengthened the GOP in both houses, would have ensured its passage in 1921, so Wilson can claim only very limited credit for it.
I shall always regret Charles E Hughes' defeat in 1916, and occasionally wonder whether even Harding might have been a lesser evil.
