Hugh R. Wilson, II was born on January 29, 1885, in Evanston, Illinois, the second son and third of four children of Hugh Robert Wilson and Alice Tousey. Both parents were Middle Westerners, respectively from Ohio and Indiana. The father was a founder and partner of Wilson Brothers, a Chicago wholesale house dealing in men's furnishings.
Growing up in a well-to-do Episcopalian family, Wilson, II was educated at the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and at Yale, where he received the Bachelor's degree in 1906.
Yale awarded Wilson, II an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1939. Bryant College awarded him an honorary degree the same year.
He spent a year traveling around the world and then entered the family business. Increasingly, however, he began to find stultifying both the pursuit of wealth and the domination of his uncle, who had led the firm since his father's death in 1900. Seeking a "pleasant interval, " Wilson looked to diplomatic service for greater intellectual and social stimulation, despite family misgivings about diplomacy as the "football of politics" and about the corrupting influence of European mores.
After studying at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques in Paris (1910 - 1911) and serving briefly as private secretary to Edwin Morgan, the American minister in Lisbon, Wilson returned to the United States and passed the Foreign Service examination.
The following year (1912) he was appointed secretary of the American legation in Guatemala. A similar post followed in Buenos Aires (1914 - 1916), and after other brief assignments, he became first secretary in Berne, Switzerland (1917 - 1919).
Wilson held a variety of diplomatic posts during the 1920s: counselor of the American embassies in Berlin (1920 - 1921) and Tokyo (1921 - 1923); chief of the Division of Current Information in the State Department (1924 - 1927). In the controversy over the administration of the Rogers Act of 1924, which amalgamated the diplomatic and consular branches into a single foreign service, he worked actively, as chairman of the Foreign Service Personnel Board, for the more rapid promotion of diplomats, believing them to be superior to their consular counterparts.
In 1927 President Coolidge appointed Wilson minister to Switzerland. Wilson's ten years in Switzerland were probably the happiest and most fruitful of his diplomatic career. He reported ably on European events, tactfully channeled information to Washington on League of Nations affairs in Geneva, and represented the United States at conferences dealing with such subjects as tariffs, prisoners of war, and disarmament.
During the Manchurian crisis of 1931 - 1932 he helped secure League of Nations adoption of the nonrecognition doctrine of Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson; but he soon came to question the value of nonrecognition, considering it a moral condemnation that only strengthened the bonds among unnatural allies in the community of the damned (Japan, and later Italy and Germany).
While serving as a delegate to the World Disarmament Conference of 1932 - 1934, Wilson proposed to Washington that the United States forego its traditional position on neutrality and freedom of trade and aid collective security by not interfering with sanctions against an aggressor nation, a position briefly advanced by the Roosevelt administration but then dropped in the face of isolationist protests.
Wilson returned to Washington in August 1937 as assistant secretary of state.
The following January, President Roosevelt named him to succeed William E. Dodd as ambassador to Nazi Germany. Wilson hoped to encourage reintegration of Germany into the political and economic mainstream of Europe. Like the appeasers, he believed that Hitler desired peace with the Western powers and sought only limited goals; he considered the Soviet Union a greater menace to European security. He thought the German Anschluss with Austria defensible and praised the Munich settlement as possibly opening the way to "a better Europe. "
President Roosevelt recalled Wilson in November 1938 to protest the Nazi pogrom against the Jews, and he was not allowed to return to his post, which he resigned at the end of August 1939.
Wilson next became an administrative officer in the State Department assigned to handle war-related problems, and in January 1940, he was appointed vice-chairman of the department's Advisory Committee on Problems of Foreign Relations, dealing with peace plans, disarmament, and international economics.
He resigned from the Foreign Service at the end of 1940. During World War II he served (1941 - 1945) in the Office of Strategic Services, an agency for espionage and counterintelligence. A Republican, Wilson also acted during the war as a liaison between his party and the Roosevelt administration.
In 1945 he became chief of the foreign affairs section of the Republican National Committee.
On December 29, 1946, at the age of sixty-one, Wilson died of a heart attack in Bennington, Vermont, where he had a summer home. He was buried in Rosehill Cemetery, Chicago.
As with many of this first generation of professional American diplomats, Wilson's affluent, genteel Victorian background shaped his views of world politics. He admired British elitist traditions and was instinctively partial to England after the outbreak of World War I, but he was always wary of British motives and felt that Germany was no more responsible for the war than any other belligerent.
He approved American entry into the war, but believed that President Wilson's visionary diplomacy raised hopes too high and was doomed by British and French realism. He considered the Versailles Treaty vindictive and thought it best that the United States did not join the League of Nations.
He deplored the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, and even more the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which he felt ended the "scrupulous courtesy" of international affairs and inaugurated a new era of "diplomacy by vituperation. "
On April 25, 1914, Hugh R. Wilson, II married Katherine Bogle, they had one son.
