Woodrow Wilson was an American politician who served as the 28th president of the United States from 1913 to 1921. A member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as the president of Princeton University and the 34th governor of New Jersey before winning the 1912 presidential election.
Wilson was born in 1856 and grew up in the American South during the Civil War and Reconstruction era. After earning his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University, he became a university professor at various colleges before being appointed the president of Princeton University, earning a reputation as a spokesman for progressivism in higher education. He was elected Governor of New Jersey on the Democratic ticket in 1910 and broke with party bosses while passing several progressive reforms, earning him widespread national acclaim. He became the Democratic nominee in the 1912 presidential election and defeated both the incumbent Republican President William Howard Taft and former President Theodore Roosevelt's third-party bid to become the 28th President of the United States.
Wilson entered office with a progressive agenda dubbed the "New Freedom" plan, which called for conservation of natural resources, banking reform, tariff reduction, and regulation of trusts. He passed the Revenue Act of 1913, which lowered tariffs and created the modern income tax, and the Federal Reserve Act of 1914, which created the Federal Reserve System. The Federal Trade Commission Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act, also passed by Wilson, promoted business competition and empowered the federal government to further fight monopolistic trusts. However, Wilson's first term also saw the widespread imposition of segregation throughout the federal bureaucracy.
Foreign affairs began to dominate Wilson's presidency after the outbreak of the Weltkrieg in 1914, and he sought to maintain American neutrality "in thought as well as in action". He refused to recognize the government of Victoriano Huerta in Mexico and ordered the occupation of Veracruz after US sailors were detained without apology. Following the sinking of the RMS Lusitania and the SS Sussex incident, Wilson managed to pressure Germany into pledging to constrain submarine warfare to the international prize rules, avoiding the possibility of American intervention in the war. He authorized the Punitive Expedition under General John J. Pershing after Mexican revolutionary forces under General Pancho Villa attacked the border town of Columbus, New Mexico, leading to a severe straining of US-Mexican relations. Nevertheless, Wilson's success in keeping the United States neutral during the course of the Weltkrieg became a major factor in his subsequent victory in the 1916 presidential election.
Wilson's second term saw the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbade the denial of the right to vote "on account of sex". Wilson had hoped to run for a third term in the 1920 presidential election but suffered a serious stroke on 2 October 1919 that left him medically incapacitated, and the Democratic party instead nominated his Treasury Secretary, William Gibbs McAdoo. After the end of his second term in 1921, he moved with his wife to a town house in the Kalorama section of Washington, DC, where he died in 1924 at the age of sixty-seven.
Biography[]
Early Life and Education[]
Woodrow Wilson was born on 28 December 1856 in Staunton, Virginia to Jessie Janet Woodrow and Joseph Ruggles Wilson, a family of Scots-Irish and Scottish descent. His parents were staunch supporters of the Confederacy during the American Civil War and his father was one of the founders of the Southern Presbyterian Church after it split from the Northern Presbyterians in 1861, ministering in Augusta, Georgia. In 1870 the family moved to Columbia, South Carolina where Wilson’s father became a professor at Columbia Theology Seminary.
Wilson attended Davidson College in North Carolina for a year before transferring to Princeton University (then called the College of New Jersey), where he graduated in 1879. He briefly attended the University of Virginia School of Law but was forced to withdraw after a year due to ill health, after which he continued his studies while living with his parents in North Carolina. He was admitted to the Georgia bar and made a brief attempt at establishing a legal practice in Atlanta in 1882, but abandoned his practice after less than a year to pursue the study of political science and history.
Academia[]
In 1885 Wilson began teaching at Bryn Mawr College, a recently-established women's school in Pennsylvania, and published his first book entitled Congressional Government, which received widespread acclaim in academic circles. The following year he received his Ph.D. in history and government from Johns Hopkins University, and in 1888 he took a position at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, an elite undergraduate college for men. After two years at Wesleyan he was appointed Chair of Jurisprudence and Political Economy at his alma mater, Princeton University. Wilson's academic reputation continued to grow throughout the 1890s, and he turned down multiple positions elsewhere including at Johns Hopkins and the University of Virginia.
Wilson was appointed President of Princeton University in 1902 and he subsequently set out “to transform thoughtless boys performing tasks into thinking men”. He established the new preceptorial system, whereby students met in groups of six under the guidance of teaching assistants called preceptors, and worked to improve the school’s curriculum. He appointed the first Jewish and Roman Catholic individuals to the faculty, but worked to keep African-Americans from attending even as other Ivy League schools began to accept small numbers of them. Wilson’s efforts to reform Princeton earned him national notoriety and he soon began to consider a run for political office.
Governor of New Jersey[]
Having lost the previous five gubernatorial elections, New Jersey Democratic leaders James Smith Jr. and George Brinton McClellan Harvey decided to throw their support behind Wilson, hoping that his inexperience in governing would make him easy to influence. Wilson won the nomination with the party bosses’ support at the state convention, but campaigned on a promise to be independent of them and presented himself as a full-fledged progressive. In the 1910 gubernatorial election, Wilson soundly defeated Republican nominee Vivian M. Lewis by a margin of more than 65,000 votes. Once in office, Wilson instituted a number of progressive reforms such as regulation of public utilities, establishment of primary elections for all elective offices and party officials, a corrupt practices law, and a workers’ compensation statute. He demonstrated his independence from the state’s Democratic political machine when he refused to endorse James Smith Jr.’s bid for US Senate, instead lending his support to James Edgar Martine, who would go on to win the primary and subsequent senate election.
1912 Presidential Election[]
Wilson’s success as governor and clashes with the state’s party bosses elevated his national profile and enhanced his reputation within the rising Progressive movement. Wilson brought on William Gibbs McAdoo and Edward M. House to manage his presidential campaign, and made a special effort to win the approval of three-time Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan prior to the 1912 Democratic National Convention. Wilson’s main opponent in the primary was Speaker of the House Champ Clark, who was endorsed by the powerful New York Tammany Hall political machine at the convention. The support of Tammany backfired, however, when Bryan gave a speech denouncing Clark as the candidate of “Wall Street” and throwing his support behind Wilson, swinging the convention in his favor.
Wilson faced two major opponents in the 1912 general election, as the Republican Party had split between the incumbent President William Howard Taft and former President Theodore Roosevelt, who formed his own Progressive “Bull Moose” Party. During the campaign, Wilson asserted that it was the task of the government "to make those adjustments of life which will put every man in a position to claim his normal rights as a living, human being". After an intense contest, Wilson ultimately won the presidential election in a landslide, with 435 of 531 electoral votes and forty-two percent of the popular vote, becoming the first Democrat to win the highest office in twenty years.
Presidency[]
Domestic Policy[]
Wilson entered office with a bold domestic agenda he called the “New Freedom” plan, which consisted of four major priorities for his administration: conservation of natural resources, banking reform, tariff reduction, and regulation of trusts. He introduced these proposals before a joint session of Congress in April 1913, becoming the first president since John Adams to appear before Congress in person. In October he accomplished the first step of his agenda when he signed The Revenue Act of 1913, which reduced tariffs and replaced the revenue with a federal income tax of one percent on incomes above $3,000, affecting the wealthiest three percent of the population. The policies of the Wilson administration had a substantial impact on the composition of government revenue, which now primarily came from taxation rather than tariffs. This was followed in December with the Federal Reserve Act, creating a central banking system in the United States which began operating in 1915.
In April 1914 Wilson dispatched federal troops to Colorado to help put an end to the Colorado Coalfield War, one of the deadliest labor disputes in US history. That September, Wilson signed the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, which created the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate antitrust violations and enforce antitrust laws independently of the Department of Justice. The next month he signed the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, which built on the Sherman Antitrust Act by defining and banning several anti-competitive practices. Despite disagreeing with them on constitutional grounds, he signed the Federal Farm Loan Act and the Keating-Owen Act, the first child labor law in US history.
Wilson was the first southerner elected to presidency since Zachary Taylor in 1848 and the only former subject of the Confederacy to be elected, and his ascension was celebrated by many southern segregationists. Wilson's administration escalated the discriminatory hiring policies and segregation of government offices that had begun under President Roosevelt and had continued under President Taft. Wilson allowed his Cabinet Secretaries to segregate their respective departments and by the end of 1913 many departments, including the Navy, Treasury, and Post Office, had segregated work spaces, restrooms, and cafeterias. Many agencies used segregation as a pretext to adopt a whites-only employment policy by claiming they lacked facilities for black workers, and many African-Americans employed prior to the Wilson administration were either offered early retirement, transferred, or simply fired.
Foreign Policy[]
Mexico[]
Wilson took office shortly after the assassination of Mexican President Francisco I. Madero, who had been ousted in a coup and replaced by General Victoriano Huerta. Wilson refused to recognize the legitimacy of Huerta's "government of butchers" and demanded that he resign in favor of democratic elections. Wilson imposed an arms embargo on the Huerta government in August 1913 and began backing revolutionary factions in the north. After American agents discovered that the German merchant ship, the Ypiranga, was carrying arms to Huerta's regime, Wilson ordered troops to the port of Veracruz to stop the ship from docking. On 9 April 1914 Mexican officials in the port of Tampico arrested a group of US sailors and refused to apologize in the terms that the US demanded. Wilson subsequently ordered the US Navy to bombard the port of Veracruz and occupied it for seven months, causing serious damage to US-Mexican relations. The ABC Powers of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile arbitrated the dispute at the Niagara Falls peace conference held in Ontario, Canada, and US troops subsequently left Mexican soil, averting an escalation of the conflict to war.
An increasing number of border raids in early 1916 culminated in a raid on Columbus, New Mexico by famed revolutionary general Pancho Villa on 8 March, leaving a number of American citizens and soldiers dead. Wilson responded the next day by appointed General John J. Pershing as commander of a "Punitive Expedition" to hunt down and capture Villa. On 14 March a force of around 10,000 men under the command of General Pershing crossed the border in search of Villa, but the US mission was changed to plan for the possibility of war after Mexican troops under Venustiano Carranza, then-head of the Mexican government, were sent to resist the incursion on Mexican soil. After war was averted diplomatically, the expedition remained in Mexico until February 1917 to encourage Carranza's government to pursue Villa and to prevent further raids across the border.
Neutrality during the Weltkrieg[]
The outbreak of the Weltkrieg in 1914 brought foreign affairs to the center of Wilson’s presidency, and he resolved to keep the United States “impartial in thought as well as action”. Wilson insisted on the American right to trade with both sides of the conflict, but the powerful British Royal Navy had imposed a blockade on Germany since the outbreak of the war. In response, the German Kaiserliche Marine began a campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1915, raising tensions considerably with the neutral United States. After a German submarine deliberately torpedoed the British Cunard luxury liner RMS Lusitania on 7 May, leading to the deaths of 128 US citizens, Wilson demanded that the German government "take immediate steps to prevent the recurrence" of such incidents. Germany abandoned the practice in September 1915 in favor of "intensified submarine warfare", a compromise between internationally accepted prize rules and unrestricted submarine warfare. After the torpedoing of the SS Sussex resulted in the deaths of four Americans, however, Wilson managed to pressure Germany into pledging to constrain submarine warfare to the international prize rules, which represented a major diplomatic concession. Wilson's success in keeping the United States neutral during the course of the war was a major factor in his victory in the 1916 presidential election.
1916 Presidential Election[]
Wilson was renominated at the 1916 Democratic Nation Convention without opposition and called for legislation providing for an eight-hour day and six-day workweek, health and safety measures, the prohibition of child labor, and safeguards for female workers in order to attract progressive voters. Warning that a Republican victory would lead to war with Germany, Wilson and the Democrats campaigned on the slogan, "He Kept Us Out of War". Wilson faced Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes in the general election, and Hughes and the Republicans campaigned heavily against Wilson's domestic agenda, especially the tariff reduction and new income taxes. The election was one of the closest in American history, but Wilson was ultimately able to secure a narrow victory of 277 to 264 in the electoral college by sweeping the Solid South and winning several swing-states by extremely small margins.
Following Wilson's election, he continued to maintain the American policy of neutrality that had won him the race and he had kept since the beginning of the conflict in Europe. His second term saw the defeat of a proposed constitutional amendment that would have prohibited the production, importation, transportation, and distribution of alcohol, as well as the adoption of a constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote. Wilson had hoped to run for a third term in the 1920 presidential election, but he suffered a serious stroke on 2 October 1919 that left him medically incapacitated. The Democratic Party instead nominated William Gibbs McAdoo, Wilson's Treasury Secretary, who went on to win the 1920 presidential election.
Post-Presidency and Death[]
After the end of his second term in 1921, Wilson and his wife moved from the White House to a town house in the Kalorama section of Washington, DC. His health did not improve after leaving office, and Wilson died on 3 February 1924 at the age of sixty-seven. He was interred in Washington National Cathedral and is the only president whose final resting place lies within the nation's capital.
Personal Life[]
Wilson married his first wife Ellen Louis Axson, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister from Georgia, on 24 June 1885, and together they had three daughters: Margaret (b. 1886), Jessie (1887), and Eleanor (b. 1889), who married Wilson's Treasury Secretary and future US President William Gibbs McAdoo in May 1914. Ellen died of Bright's disease on 6 August 1914.
Wilson married his second wife Edith Balling Galt, a southern widow, on 18 December 1915, and they remained married until his death.