Woodrow Wilson

• Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856 – February 3, 1924) was

the 28th President of the United States.
• A leading intellectual of the Progressive Era, he served
as President of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910, and then as
the Governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913.
• With Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft dividing
the Republican Party vote, Wilson was elected President as
a Democrat in 1912.
• In his first term, Wilson persuaded a Democratic Congress to pass
the Federal Reserve Act,Federal Trade Commission, the Clayton
Antitrust Act, the Federal Farm Loan Act and America's first-ever
federal progressive income tax in the Revenue Act of 1913.
• Wilson brought many white Southerners into his administration, and
tolerated their expansion of segregation in many federal agencies.
• Narrowly re-elected in 1916, Wilson's second term centered on World
War I.
• He based his re-election campaign around the slogan "he kept us out
of the war", but U.S. neutrality was challenged in early 1917 when the
German government proposed to Mexico a military alliance in a war
against the U.S., and began unrestricted submarine warfare, sinking
without warning every American merchant ship its submarines could
find.
• Wilson in April 1917 asked Congress to declare war.
• He focused on diplomacy and financial considerations, leaving the
waging of the war primarily in the hands of the Army.
• On the home front in 1917, he began the United States' first draft since
the US civil war, raised billions in war funding through Liberty Bonds,
set up the War Industries Board, promoted labor union growth,
supervised agriculture and food production through the Lever Act, took
over control of the railroads, enacted the first federal drug prohibition,
and suppressed anti-war movements. National women's suffrage was
also achieved under Wilson's presidency.
• In the late stages of the war, Wilson took personal control of
negotiations with Germany, including the armistice.
• He issued his Fourteen Points, his view of a post-war world that could
avoid another terrible conflict.
• He went to Paris in 1919 to create the League of Nations and shape
the Treaty of Versailles, with special attention on creating new nations
out of defunctempires.
• Largely for his efforts to form the League, he was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize.
• In 1919, during the bitter fight with the Republican-
controlled Senate over the U.S. joining the League of Nations, Wilson
collapsed with a debilitating stroke.
• He refused to compromise, effectively destroying any chance for
ratification.
• The League of Nations was established anyway, but the United States
never joined.
• A Presbyterian of deep religious faith, he appealed to a gospel of
service and infused a profound sense of moralism into Wilsonianism.
• Wilson's idealistic internationalism, now referred to as "Wilsonianism",
which calls for the United States to enter the world arena to fight for
democracy, has been a contentious position in American foreign policy,
serving as a model for "idealists" to emulate and "realists" to reject
ever since.
• In 1910 Wilson ran for Governor of New Jersey against the Republican
candidate Vivian M. Lewis, the State Commissioner of Banking and
Insurance.
• Wilson's campaign focused on his independence from machine politics,
and he promised that if elected he would not be beholden to party
bosses.
• Wilson soundly defeated Lewis in the general election by a margin of
more than 49,000 votes, although Republican William Howard Taft had
carried New Jersey in the 1908 presidential election by more than
80,000 votes.
• In the 1910 election the Democrats also took control of the General
Assembly. The State Senate, however, remained in Republican control
by a slim margin.
• After taking office, Wilson set in place his reformist agenda, ignoring
the demands of party machinery.
• While governor, in a period spanning six months, Wilson established
state primaries.
• This all but took the party bosses out of the presidential election
process in the state.
• He also revamped the public utility commission, and
introduced worker's compensation.