WOODROW WILSON . 1913-1921

Like Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson saw himself as the personal representative of the people. "No one but the President," he said, "seems to be expected ... to look out for the general interests of the country."

Wilson was born on December 28, 1856, in Staunton, Virginia. His father was a pastor in Augusta, Georgia, during the Civil War and a professor in the city of Columbia, South Carolina during Reconstruction, so young Woodrow had seen the frightfulness of war. After graduating from Princeton (then the College of New Jersey) and the University of Virginia Law School, Wilson earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University and entered upon an academic career. He advanced rapidly as a conservative young professor of political science and became president of Princeton in 1902.

After becoming governor of New Jersey in 1910, he was nominated for president at the 1912 Democratic Convention. Wilson won the campaign on a program called the New Freedom, which stressed individualism and states' rights. As president, he passed major pieces of legislation through Congress. The first was a lower tariff, the Underwood Act; attached to the measure was a graduated federal income tax. The passage of the Federal Reserve Act provided the nation with the more elastic money supply it badly needed. In 1914 antitrust legislation established a Federal Trade Commission to prohibit unfair business practices.

More legislation came in 1916. One law prohibited child labor; another limited railroad workers to an eight-hour day. By virtue of this legislation and the slogan "he kept us out of war," Wilson narrowly won re-election. But after the election, Wilson concluded that America could not remain neutral in the World War. On April 2, 1917, he asked Congress for a declaration of war on Germany to make the world "safe for democracy."

Massive American effort slowly tipped the balance in favor of the Allies. After the Germans signed the Armistice in November 1918, Wilson went to Paris to try to build an enduring peace. He later presented to the Senate the Versailles Treaty, containing the Covenant of the League of Nations, and asked, "Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?"

But the election of 1918 had shifted the balance in Congress to the Republicans. By seven votes the Versailles Treaty failed in the Senate. The president, against the warnings of his doctors, had made a national tour to mobilize public sentiment for the treaty. Exhausted, he suffered a stroke and nearly died. Tenderly nursed by his wife, he lived until 1924.

WARREN G. HARDING . 1921-1923

Before his nomination, Warren G. Harding declared, "America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality..."

One Democratic leader called the speech "an army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea." But its very murkiness was effective, since Harding’s pronouncements remained unclear on the League of Nations. Thirty-one distinguished Republicans had assured voters that a vote for Harding was a vote for the League. But Harding interpreted his election as a mandate to stay out of the League of Nations.

Born in Corsica, Ohio, on August 2, 1865, Harding's undeviating Republicanism and his willingness to let the machine bosses set policies led him far in that state’s politics. He served as lieutenant governor and then ran unsuccessfully for governor. In 1914 he was elected to the Senate.

When the principal candidates of the 1920 Republican Convention deadlocked, a group of Senators turned to Harding. He won the presidential election by an unprecedented landslide of 60 percent of the popular vote. Republicans in Congress easily got the new president's signature on their bills. They eliminated wartime controls and slashed taxes, established a federal budget system, restored the high protective tariff, and imposed tight limitations upon immigration. By 1923 the postwar depression seemed to be giving way to a new surge of prosperity, and newspapers hailed Harding as a wise statesman.

Behind the façade, word began to reach the president that some of his friends were using their official positions for their own enrichment. Harding was alarmed. Looking wan and depressed, he journeyed westward in the summer of 1923, taking with him his upright secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover.

"If you knew of a great scandal in our administration," he asked Hoover, "would you for the good of the country and the party expose it publicly or would you bury it?" Hoover urged publishing it, but Harding feared the political repercussions.

He did not live to find out how the public would react to the scandals of his administration. In August of 1923, he died in San Francisco of a heart attack.

CALVIN COOLIDGE . 1923-1929

At 2:30 on the morning of August 3, 1923, while visiting in Vermont, Calvin Coolidge received word that he was president. By the light of a kerosene lamp, his father, who was a notary public, administered the oath of office as Coolidge placed his hand on the family Bible.

Born in Plymouth, Vermont, on July 4, 1872, Coolidge was the son of a storekeeper. He graduated from Amherst College with honors, and entered law and polities in Northampton, Massachusetts. Slowly, methodically, he went up the political ladder from councilman to Republican governor of Massachusetts. En route, he became thoroughly conservative.

As president, Coolidge demonstrated his determination to preserve the old moral and economic precepts amid the material prosperity that many Americans were enjoying. He refused to use federal economic power to check the growing boom or to ameliorate the depressed condition of agriculture and certain industries. His first message to Congress in December 1923 called for isolation in foreign policy, tax cuts, and limited aid to farmers. He rapidly became popular, and easily won the election in the 1924.

In his inaugural address, he asserted that the country had achieved "a state of contentment seldom before seen," and pledged himself to maintain the status quo. In subsequent years he twice vetoed farm relief bills, and killed a plan to produce cheap federal electric power on the Tennessee River. The political genius of President Coolidge, Walter Lippmann pointed out in 1926, was his talent for effectively doing nothing: "This active inactivity …suits all the business interests which want to be let alone.... And it suits all those who have become convinced that government in this country has become dangerously complicated and top-heavy. . ."

Coolidge was both the most negative and remote of presidents, but no president was kinder in permitting himself to be photographed in Indian war bonnets or cowboy dress, and in greeting a variety of delegations to the White House. Both his dry Yankee wit and his frugality with words became legendary. On August 2, 1927,while vacationing in the Black Hills of South Dakota, he issued the most famous of his laconic statements, "I do not choose to run for President in 1928."

By the time the disaster of the Great Depression hit the country, Coolidge was in retirement. Before his death in January 1933, he confided to an old friend, ". . . I feel I no longer fit in with these times."

HERBERT HOOVER . 1929-1933

Son of a Quaker blacksmith, Herbert Clark Hoover brought to the presidency an unparalleled reputation for public service as an engineer, administrator and humanitarian.

Born in West Branch, Iowa on August 10, 1874, he grew up in Oregon. He enrolled at Stanford University when it opened in 1891, graduating as a mining engineer. He went to China, where he worked for a private corporation as China's leading engineer. In June 1900 the Boxer Rebellion caught Hoover in Tientsin. For almost a month the settlement was under heavy fire. While his wife worked in hospitals, Hoover directed the building of barricades, and once risked his life rescuing Chinese children.

When Germany declared war on France, the American consul general asked Hoover’s help in getting out stranded tourists. His committee helped 120,000 Americans return home. After the United States entered the war, President Wilson appointed him head of the Food Administration. He succeeded in cutting consumption of foods needed overseas and avoided rationing at home, yet kept the Allies fed. After the Armistice, Hoover led the American Relief Administration. In 1921, he aided famine-stricken Soviet Russia. Criticized for helping Bolshevism, he retorted, "Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!"

After serving as secretary of commerce under Presidents Harding and Coolidge, Hoover became the Republican presidential nominee in 1928. His election seemed to ensure prosperity. Yet within months the stock market crashed, and the nation spiraled into depression. After the crash Hoover announced that while he would keep the federal budget balanced, he would cut taxes and expand public works spending. He asked for the creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to aid businesses, help farmers facing foreclosures, reform banking and feed the unemployed. He also said that while people must not suffer, caring for them must be primarily a local and voluntary responsibility.

His opponents in Congress unfairly painted him as a callous and cruel. President Hoover became the scapegoat for the depression and was badly defeated in 1932. Throughout the 30s he was a powerful critic of the New Deal, warning against tendencies toward statism.

In 1947 President Truman appointed Hoover to a commission to reorganize the Executive Departments. He was appointed chairman of a similar commission in 1953 by President Eisenhower. Many economies resulted from both commissions' recommendations. Over the years, Hoover wrote many articles and books, one of which he was working on when he died at 90 in New York City on October 20, 1964.