Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856 - February 3, 1924) was the twenty-eighth President of the United States (1913 - 1921). The son of a Presbyterian minister, raised in the Confederate South, Wilson was a political scientist and president of Princeton University before entering politics, and remains the only president to hold a Ph.D.
From lecture hall to White House
Wilson's rise was the fastest in American political history: president of Princeton until 1910, governor of New Jersey in 1911, president of the United States in 1913. He won the 1912 election with just under 42 percent of the popular vote after Theodore Roosevelt's third-party run split the Republicans.
The New Freedom
Wilson's first term produced the most sweeping domestic legislation since the founding era: the Underwood Tariff with the first modern income tax, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 creating the nation's central banking system, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Clayton Antitrust Act. He was also responsible for one of the era's great disgraces, permitting cabinet departments to racially segregate their workforces.
The First World War
Reelected in 1916 on the slogan "He kept us out of war," Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany five months later, in April 1917, after unrestricted submarine warfare resumed and the Zimmermann Telegram proposed a German-Mexican alliance. "The world must be made safe for democracy," he told Congress. Two million American soldiers reached France and tipped the balance on the Western Front.
In January 1918 Wilson announced his Fourteen Points, a blueprint for peace ending in a "general association of nations." He went to Paris himself, the first president to travel to Europe in office, and made the League of Nations the heart of the Treaty of Versailles.
The fight for the League and the broken presidency
The Senate, led by Henry Cabot Lodge, would not accept the treaty without reservations, and Wilson would not compromise. Barnstorming the country for the League in September 1919, he collapsed in Pueblo, Colorado, and days later suffered a massive stroke that left him partly paralyzed. For the remaining seventeen months of his term, his wife Edith controlled access to the president so completely that historians have called her the functional acting president. The treaty failed; the United States never joined the League. Wilson received the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize nonetheless, and died in Washington in 1924.
Also in the Wilson years
The 18th Amendment (Prohibition) and the 19th Amendment (women's suffrage, which Wilson eventually supported publicly) were both ratified; the first transcontinental telephone call was made; and the influenza pandemic of 1918 killed more than half a million Americans, a crisis his administration largely declined to address publicly in wartime.
Highlights of the Wilson presidency
- The Federal Reserve (1913), still the backbone of American monetary policy.
- Victory in the First World War and the Fourteen Points.
- The League of Nations, won at Paris, lost in the Senate.
- The 19th Amendment: women's suffrage ratified in 1920.
- The Nobel Peace Prize (1919), the second sitting president to receive it.
Read his words on this site: First Inaugural Address (1913) and Second Inaugural Address (1917).