Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924)
President of the United States;
Resident of Columbia, 1870-1874
"The Visionary President"
Fast Facts
Born: December 28, 1856, in Staunton, Virginia
Died: February 3, 1924, in Washington, D.C.
Married: Ellen Louise Axson (1860-1914), on June 24, 1885; Edith Bolling Galt (1872-1961), on December 18, 1915
Religion: Presbyterian
Education: College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), A.B., 1879; A.M., 1882; University of Virginia Law School, 1879-81; Johns Hopkins, Ph.D., 1886
Political Party: Democrat
Career: Lawyer; Professor; Author; President of College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), 1902-10; Governor of New Jersey, 1911-13; President of the United States, 1913-21
Domestic Policy Highlights: Underwood Act, Federal Reserve Act of 1913, Clayton Antitrust Act, Espionage and Sedition Acts
Foreign Policy Highlights: World War I, Fourteen Points, Mexico, League of Nations
A Life in Brief
Woodrow Wilson was one of our nation's most influential
and visionary presidents; only Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin
Roosevelt are ranked above him in importance. Born in Virginia in 1856
and raised in Georgia, Wilson's earliest memories include seeing
Yankee soldiers marching into town during the Civil War. Wilson's father was
a Presbyterian minister who fervently supported the South's secession from
the Union. A frail and sickly child, Wilson twice withdrew from college
due to failing health, eventually graduating from Princeton.
After studying on his own and successfully passing the bar exam to become
a lawyer in North Carolina, Wilson enrolled at Johns Hopkins University,
where he received a Ph.D. in political science.As a professor and then president of Princeton University, Wilson never shrank from controversy, and his efforts to modernize the college brought him attention throughout New Jersey. This highly visible post built his reputation as a leading progressive, and in 1910, Democratic Party representatives approached him about running for governor. Wilson accepted, but on the condition that their support come with "no strings attached."
Rapid Rise to National Power
From this point, Wilson's rise to national power was astonishingly fast. As governor of New Jersey, he immediately began to fight machine politics and party bosses, calling for campaign finance reform and direct elections for state officials, rather than appointments based on patronage. With the support of William Jennings Bryan, leader of the national Democratic Party, Wilson ran for president in 1912. After narrowly winning the Democratic primary, Wilson faced off against Republicans split into two camps: William Taft, the incumbent president, carried the official Republican nomination, but Theodore Roosevelt, enraged that Taft had locked his supporters out of the nominating convention, split off and formed the short-lived "Bull Moose Party." Taft and Roosevelt split the Republican votes, and Wilson won the election with a little more than 40 percent of the vote.
Wilson's "New Freedom" platform was ambitious and thoroughly progressive. It called for limits on campaign contributions by corporations, tariff reductions, a federal income tax, direct election of senators, and the break-up of huge monopolies that reduced competition and hurt consumers. With the unshakable confidence that God had put him in office, Wilson pursued his New Freedom agenda with the zeal of a crusader, making use of his talent and passion as an inspired orator to galvanize the nation in support of his policies. Fighting the raw capitalism that concentrated so much wealth and power into the hands of a few multimillionaires, Wilson successfully pushed through the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. This created the strong federal system that still provides the framework for regulating the nation's banks, credit, and money supply today. Other Wilson-backed legislation broke up monopolies and supported unions to ensure fair treatment of working Americans.
The outcome of the 1916 election was one of the few that hinged on foreign affairs. Europe was fighting a world war, and so far, President Wilson had kept the U.S. neutral. Running with the slogan, "He Kept Us Out of War," Wilson was re-elected by a narrow margin.
Aggressive Policies
In foreign affairs, Wilson was determined to revise the imperialist practices of earlier administrations, establishing a bill of rights for the Philippines and territorial independence for Puerto Rico. But Wilson's own policies could sometimes be imperialistic. After refusing to recognize the Mexican government of General Huerto, he said, "I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men." He then sent U.S. forces into Mexico on an unsuccessful mission to try to get a change of government. Wilson's neutrality in the European war ended when the Germans refused to curtail their submarine warfare after 120 Americans were killed aboard the British liner, Lusitania, and a secret correspondence between Germany and Mexico was uncovered. In 1917, Congress voted overwhelmingly to go to war.
With the nation at war, Wilson put his progressive agenda on the back burner in order to concentrate on a full-scale mobilization of the economy and industry. Under Wilson, industrial production increased by 20 percent, daylight savings time was instituted to save fuel, the government took over the telephone and telegraph systems, and a massive shipbuilding program was launched. Americans began paying a new income tax and buying Liberty Bonds to pay for the war. The tremendous authority the federal government exercised over the U.S. economy during World War I has never been matched. And not all of this authority was positive; there was wide scale abuse of civil liberties during the Wilson administration, which Wilson justified in the name of the war. Wilson sponsored Espionage and Sedition Acts which outlawed criticism of the government, the armed forces, and the war effort. Violators of the law were imprisoned or fined, and even mainstream publications were censored or banned.
League of Nations
Wilson's trip to France in December, 1918 was the first time an American President had gone to Europe while in office. His peace plan, called "The Fourteen Points," aimed to prevent the secret alliances and treaties that pulled the world into war in 1914. The imperialist order would be dismantled by guaranteeing self-rule to non-white colonial holdings, and all European sections of the huge Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires would be granted immediate independence. Most important, a new international League of Nations would transform international relations and usher in a new era of peace. Under Wilson's plan, Germany would not have been forced into the crippling victory terms that bankrupted its economy. Unfortunately, the Allies imposed the Treaty of Versailles and Wilson came home with only a modified League of Nations in hand for Senate consent.
Right away, Wilson launched into an arduous speaking tour to promote U.S. participation in the new League of Nations. Exhausted, he collapsed with a stroke and became increasingly isolated during his final months in office, seeing no one but his second wife, Edith Galt Wilson, through whom he conducted the affairs of state. Refusing to compromise with Congress on any aspects of the League, Wilson eventually told his supporters to vote against an amended treaty, and thus the Senate rejected. America never joined the international organization that Wilson had as the hallmark of his new world order.
Though he left office a broken man, rigid in his idealistic commitment to a League of Nations that would have been accepted had he only been willing to compromise, Wilson nevertheless impacted both the presidency and the nation more than any president since Lincoln. His progressive domestic agenda helped stabilize and humanize a huge industrial system, and his visionary foreign policy guided subsequent presidents, including FDR, Truman, Nixon, Carter, Bush, and Clinton.
Bio. Source: PBS American Presidents Series
Portrait, Hall of Presidents, National Portrait Gallery