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Woodrow Wilson
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| | Order: | 28th President |
| Term of Office: | Tuesday, March 4, 1913 - Friday, March 4, 1921 |
| Predecessor: | William Howard Taft |
| Successor: | Warren G. Harding |
| Date of Birth | Sunday, December 28, 1856 |
| Place of Birth: | Staunton, Virginia |
| Date of Death: | Sunday, February 3, 1924 |
| Place of Death: | Washington, D.C. |
| First Lady: | Ellen Louise Wilson
Edith Bolling Wilson |
| Profession: | Professor |
| Political Party: | Democratic |
| Vice President: | Thomas R. Marshall |
|
Dr. Thomas Woodrow Wilson (Sunday, December 28, 1856–Sunday, February 3, 1924) was the 45th state Governor of New Jersey (1911-1913) and later the 28th President of the United States (1913-1921). He was the second Democrat to serve two consecutive terms in the White House after Andrew Jackson.
Early life and education
Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia, to Joseph Wilson and Janet Woodrow. His ancestry extends back into Strabane, Northern Ireland. He grew up in Augusta, Georgia.
Wilson attended Davidson College for one year and then transferred to Princeton University, graduating in 1879. He was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternal organization. Afterward, Wilson studied law at the University of Virginia for one year. After completing and publishing his dissertation, Congressional Government, in 1886, he received his Ph.D. in political science from Johns Hopkins University. Wilson remains the only American president to have earned a doctoral degree.
In Congressional Government, Wilson criticized the American presidential system for its weaknesses in serving the people's needs. Wilson said that the intricate system of checks and balances might have worked before the Industrial Revolution, when government was expected to be minimal, but was ineffective for modern times.
Wilson found much to praise in the parliamentary system of Great Britain.
"I ask you to put this question to yourselves," Wilson wrote,
- Should we not draw the Executive and Legislature closer together? Should we not, on the one hand, give the individual leaders of opinion in Congress a better chance to have an intimate party in determinnig who should be president, and the president, on the other hand, a better chance to approve himself a statesman, and his advisors capable men of affairs, in the guidance of Congress? (the Politics of Woodrow Wilson, 41-48)
Academic career
Wilson served on the faculties of Bryn Mawr College and Wesleyan University before joining the Princeton faculty as professor of jurisprudence and political economy in 1890. A popular teacher and respected scholar, Wilson delivered an oration at Princeton's sesquicentennial celebration (1896) entitled "Princeton in the Nation's Service." In this famous speech, he outlined his vision of the university in a democratic nation, calling on institutions of higher learning "to illuminate duty by every lesson that can be drawn out of the past."
Woodrow Wilson was unanimously elected president of Princeton on Monday, June 9, 1902. In his inaugural address as Princeton's president, Wilson developed these themes, attempting to strike a balance that would please both populists and aristocrats in the audience.
As president, Wilson began a fund-raising campaign to bolster the university corporation. The curriculum guidelines he developed during his tenure as president of Princeton proved among the most important innovations in the field of higher education. He instituted the now common system of core requirements followed by two years of concentration in a selected area. When he attempted to curtail the influence of the elitist "social clubs," however, Wilson met with resistance from trustees and potential donors. He believed the system was smothering the intellectual and moral life of the undergraduates. Opposition from wealthy and powerful alumni further convinced Wilson of the undesirability of exclusiveness and moved him towards a more populist position in his politics.
Political career
Through his published commentary on contemporary political matters, Wilson developed a national reputation and, with increasing seriousness, considered a public service career. In 1910, he received an unsolicited nomination for the governorship of New Jersey, which he eagerly accepted. As governor, he developed a platform of progressive liberalism in matters of domestic political economy.
Presidency
In the election of 1912, the Democratic Party nominated (http://www.multied.com/elections/Conventions/1912DEM.html) Wilson as their presidential candidate-even though Champ Clark was widely expected to get the nomination. William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt split the Republican Party by running against each other, allowing Wilson's victory.
On the day before Wilson's inauguration in March 1913, members of the Congressional Union, later known as the National Women's Party, organized a suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. to siphon attention away from inaugural events. It is said that when Wilson arrived in town, he found the streets empty of welcoming crowds and was told that everyone was on Pennsylvania Avenue watching the parade.
Suffrage was only one of the volatile issues Wilson faced during his presidency. Domestically, his generally progressive measures for reform often met with opposition, although he did succeed in passing a bill instituting the Federal Reserve. His attitude to racial issues is generally regarded as a stain on his reputation. His administration enforced segregation in many Federal offices and required photographs from job applicants to determine their race.
Between 1914 and 1918 the United States invaded or intervened in Latin America many times, particularly in Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, and Panama. Between 1917 and 1920 the U.S. supported the "White" side of the Russian civil war, first monetarily, but later with a naval blockade and an invasion force.
World War I
In foreign policy he faced greater challenges than any president since Abraham Lincoln. Determining whether to involve the U.S. in World War I severely tested his leadership.
President Wilson before Congress, announcing the break in the official relations with Germany. February 3, 1917.
He kept the United States neutral in the early years of World War I, which contributed to his popular re-election in 1916. However, with increased pressure, the United States entered the conflict with a formal declaration of war against Germany on Friday, April 6, 1917.
After the Great War, Wilson worked with mixed success to assure statehood for formerly oppressed nations and an equitable peace. On Tuesday, January 8, 1918, Wilson made his famous "Fourteen Points" address, introducing the idea of a League of Nations, an organization that would strive to help preserve territorial integrity and political independence among large and small nations alike.
Post-War
Wilson intended the Fourteen Points as a means toward ending the war and achieving an equitable peace for all the nations. He worked tirelessly to promote his plan at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. The charter of the proposed League of Nations was incorporated into the conference's Treaty of Versailles, but most of the other Fourteen Points fell by the wayside.
For his peacemaking efforts, Wilson was awarded the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize. Receiving the award was bittersweet, however, because he was unable to convince congressional opponents, such as Henry Cabot Lodge, to support the resolution endorsing U.S. entry into the League. United States membership, Wilson believed, was essential to ensuring lasting world peace.
Incapacity
On Thursday, September 25, 1919, Wilson suffered a mild stroke which went unannounced to the public at large. A week later, on Thursday, October 2, Wilson suffered a second, far more serious stroke which nearly totally incapacitated him. Although the extent of his disabilities was kept from the public until after his death, Wilson was purposely kept out of the presence of Vice President Thomas R. Marshall, his cabinet or Congressional visitors to the White House for the remainder of his presidential term.
While Wilson was incapacitated, Wilson's second wife, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, served as steward, selecting issues for his attention and delegating other issues to his Cabinet heads. This was to date the most serious case of presidential disability in American history, and was cited as a key example why ratification of the 25th amendment was seen as important. The amendment, which provides for installation of the Vice President as Acting President in case of presidential disability, was ratified in 1967.
In 1921, Wilson and his second wife retired from the White House to a home in the Embassy Row section of Washington, D.C. Wilson died there on Sunday, February 3, 1924. Mrs. Wilson stayed in the home another thirty-seven years, passing away on Thursday, December 28, 1961.
Cabinet
Supreme Court appointments
Wilson appointed the following Justices to the Supreme Court of the United States:
Miscellaneous facts
- Woodrow Wilson was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternal organization.
- Woodrow Wilson's ancestral home is at Strabane, Northern Ireland.
- Woodrow Wilson grew up in Augusta, Georgia.
- Woodrow Wilson was president of the American Political Science Association from 1910 to 1911.
- Wilson sailed for Versailles on Wednesday, December 4, 1918 for the World War I peace talks, which made him the first US president to travel to Europe while in office.
- Wilson House, an undergraduate dormitory at Johns Hopkins University, is named in his honor.
- While a student at Hopkins, Wilson carved his initials (WW'86) into the underside of a massive oak table in the History Department. Dark with age, they can still be seen today.
- Wilson's portrait appeared on the U.S. $100,000 bill, issued in 1934. This bill was used only for transactions between the Federal Reserve and Treasury.
- The city of Bratislava (now capital of Slovakia, Europe) was called "Wilsonovo mesto" (Wilson City) after U.S. President Wilson for a short period of time after World War I. This was to commemorate President Wilson's support for creating the state of Czechoslovakia.
- Wilson has been the subject of books by two particularly noteworthy authors. Herbert Hoover's The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson is extremely sympathetic, and remains the only book written by one ex-President about another one. Sigmund Freud and William Bullitt's Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study is devastatingly unsympathetic, and was unpublished for 30 years after Freud's death.
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