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.
