140 Facts About President Wilson

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was an American politician and academic who served as the 28th president of the United States from 1913 to 1921.

President Wilson was the leading architect of the League of Nations, and his progressive stance on foreign policy came to be known as Wilsonianism.

President Wilson negotiated the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, which created the Federal Reserve System.

At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the US declared neutrality as President Wilson tried to negotiate a peace between the Allied and Central Powers.

President Wilson narrowly won re-election in the 1916 United States presidential election, boasting how he kept the nation out of wars in Europe and Mexico.

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President Wilson nominally presided over war-time mobilization and left military matters to the generals.

President Wilson instead concentrated on diplomacy, issuing the Fourteen Points that the Allies and Germany accepted as a basis for post-war peace.

President Wilson wanted the off-year elections of 1918 to be a referendum endorsing his policies, but instead the Republicans took control of Congress.

President Wilson successfully advocated for the establishment of a multinational organization, the League of Nations.

President Wilson had refused to bring any leading Republican into the Paris talks, and back home he rejected a Republican compromise that would have allowed the Senate to ratify the Versailles Treaty and join the League.

President Wilson had intended to seek a third term in office but suffered a severe stroke in October 1919 that left him incapacitated.

Thomas Woodrow President Wilson was born to a family of Scots-Irish and Scottish descent in Staunton, Virginia.

President Wilson was the third of four children and the first son of Joseph Ruggles Wilson and Jessie Janet Woodrow.

President Wilson's family identified with the Southern United States and were staunch supporters of the Confederacy during the American Civil War.

President Wilson's father was one of the founders of the Southern Presbyterian Church in the United States after it split from the Northern Presbyterians in 1861.

President Wilson became minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Augusta, and the family lived there until 1870.

From 1870 to 1874, President Wilson lived in Columbia, South Carolina, where his father was a theology professor at the Columbia Theological Seminary.

In 1873, President Wilson became a communicant member of the Columbia First Presbyterian Church; he remained a member throughout his life.

President Wilson studied political philosophy and history, joined the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, and was active in the Whig literary and debating society.

President Wilson was elected secretary of the school's football association, president of the school's baseball association, and managing editor of the student newspaper.

President Wilson was admitted to the Georgia bar and made a brief attempt at establishing a law firm in Atlanta in 1882.

In 1883, President Wilson met and fell in love with Ellen Louise Axson, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister from Savannah, Georgia.

President Wilson proposed marriage in September 1883; she accepted, but they agreed to postpone marriage while Wilson attended graduate school.

President Wilson agreed to sacrifice further independent artistic pursuits in order to marry Wilson in 1885.

President Wilson learned German so that she could help translate works of political science that were relevant to Wilson's research.

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In late 1883, President Wilson enrolled at the recently established Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore for doctoral studies.

In 1885 to 1888, President Wilson accepted a teaching position at Bryn Mawr College, a newly established women's college near Philadelphia.

President Wilson taught ancient Greek and Roman history, American history, political science, and other subjects.

President Wilson left as soon as possible, and was not given a farewell.

In 1888, President Wilson left Bryn Mawr for Wesleyan University in Connecticut, an elite undergraduate college for men.

President Wilson coached the football team, founded a debate team, and taught graduate courses in political economy and Western history.

In February 1890, with the help of friends, President Wilson was appointed by Princeton to the Chair of Jurisprudence and Political Economy, at an annual salary of $3,000.

President Wilson quickly gained a reputation as a compelling speaker.

President Wilson supported the conservative "Gold Democrat" nominee, John M Palmer.

President Wilson published several works of history and political science and was a regular contributor to Political Science Quarterly.

President Wilson appointed the first Jew and the first Roman Catholic to the faculty, and helped liberate the board from domination by conservative Presbyterians.

President Wilson worked to keep African Americans out of the school, even as other Ivy League schools were accepting small numbers of black people.

In 1906, President Wilson awoke to find himself blind in the left eye, the result of a blood clot and hypertension.

President Wilson began to exhibit his father's traits of impatience and intolerance, which would on occasion lead to errors of judgment.

When President Wilson began vacationing in Bermuda in 1906, he met a socialite, Mary Hulbert Peck.

President Wilson sent very personal letters to her, which were later used against him by his adversaries.

President Wilson proposed moving the students into colleges, known as quadrangles, but Wilson's Quad Plan was met with fierce opposition from Princeton's alumni.

Late in his tenure, Wilson had a confrontation with Andrew Fleming West, dean of the graduate school, and West's ally ex-President Grover Cleveland, who was a trustee.

President Wilson wanted to integrate a proposed graduate school building into the campus core, while West preferred a more distant campus site.

President Wilson became disenchanted with his job due to the resistance to his recommendations, and he began considering a run for office.

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President Wilson's campaign focused on his promise to be independent of party bosses.

President Wilson quickly shed his professorial style for more emboldened speechmaking and presented himself as a full-fledged progressive.

President Wilson began formulating his reformist agenda, intending to ignore the demands of his party machinery.

Smith asked President Wilson to endorse his bid for the US Senate, but President Wilson refused and instead endorsed Smith's opponent James Edgar Martine, who had won the Democratic primary.

Republicans took control of the state assembly in early 1912, and President Wilson spent much of the rest of his tenure vetoing bills.

Shortly before leaving office, President Wilson signed a series of antitrust laws known as the "Seven Sisters, " as well as another law that removed the power to select juries from local sheriffs.

In July 1911, Wilson brought William Gibbs McAdoo and "Colonel" Edward M House in to manage the campaign.

President Wilson finally won two-thirds of the vote on the convention's 46th ballot, and Marshall became President Wilson's running mate.

President Wilson directed campaign finance chairman Henry Morgenthau not to accept contributions from corporations and to prioritize smaller donations from the widest possible quarters of the public.

Brandeis and President Wilson rejected Roosevelt's proposal to establish a powerful bureaucracy charged with regulating large corporations, instead favoring the break-up of large corporations in order to create a level economic playing field.

President Wilson engaged in a spirited campaign, criss-crossing the country to deliver numerous speeches.

President Wilson had four major domestic priorities: the conservation of natural resources, banking reform, tariff reduction, and equal access to raw materials, which was accomplished in part through the regulation of trusts.

President Wilson met extensively with Democratic senators and appealed directly to the people through the press.

President Wilson signed the Revenue Act of 1913 into law on October 3,1913.

The policies of the President Wilson administration had a durable impact on the composition of government revenue, which now primarily came from taxation rather than tariffs.

President Wilson did not wait to complete the Revenue Act of 1913 before proceeding to the next item on his agenda—banking.

President Wilson sought a middle ground between progressives such as Bryan and conservative Republicans like Nelson Aldrich, who, as chairman of the National Monetary Commission, had put forward a plan for a central bank that would give private financial interests a large degree of control over the monetary system.

President Wilson convinced Democrats on the left that the new plan met their demands.

One month after signing the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, President Wilson signed the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, which built on the Sherman Act by defining and banning several anti-competitive practices.

President Wilson thought a child labor law would probably be unconstitutional but reversed himself in 1916 with a close election approaching.

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President Wilson endorsed the bill at the last minute under pressure from party leaders who stressed how popular the idea was, especially among the emerging class of women voters.

President Wilson told Democratic Congressmen they needed to pass this law and a workman's compensation law to satisfy the national progressive movement and to win the 1916 election against a reunited GOP.

President Wilson approved the goal of upgrading the harsh working conditions for merchant sailors and signed LaFollette's Seamen's Act of 1915.

President Wilson called on the Labor Department to mediate conflicts between labor and management.

In 1914, President Wilson dispatched soldiers to help bring an end to the Colorado Coalfield War, one of the deadliest labor disputes in American history.

President Wilson disliked the excessive government involvement in the Federal Farm Loan Act, which created twelve regional banks empowered to provide low-interest loans to farmers.

President Wilson embraced the long-standing Democratic policy against owning colonies, and he worked for the gradual autonomy and ultimate independence of the Philippines, which had been acquired in 1898.

President Wilson increased self-governance on the islands by granting Filipinos greater control over the Philippine Legislature.

In 1916, President Wilson purchased by treaty the Danish West Indies, renamed as the United States Virgin Islands.

Immigration from Europe declined significantly once World War I began and President Wilson paid little attention to the issue during his presidency.

President Wilson nominated three men to the United States Supreme Court, all of whom were confirmed by the US Senate.

In 1914, President Wilson nominated sitting Attorney General James Clark McReynolds.

In 1916, President Wilson nominated Louis Brandeis to the Court, setting off a major debate in the Senate over Brandeis's progressive ideology and his religion; Brandeis was the first Jewish nominee to the Supreme Court.

Ultimately, President Wilson was able to convince Senate Democrats to vote to confirm Brandeis who served on the court until 1939.

President Wilson sought to move away from the foreign policy of his predecessors, which he viewed as imperialistic, and he rejected Taft's Dollar Diplomacy.

The President Wilson administration sent troops to occupy the Dominican Republic and intervene in Haiti, and President Wilson authorized military interventions in Cuba, Panama, and Honduras.

President Wilson took office during the Mexican Revolution, which had begun in 1911 after liberals overthrew the military dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz.

Shortly before President Wilson took office, conservatives retook power through a coup led by Victoriano Huerta.

President Wilson rejected the legitimacy of Huerta's "government of butchers" and demanded Mexico hold democratic elections.

Eager to withdraw from Mexico due to tensions in Europe, President Wilson ordered Pershing to withdraw, and the last American soldiers left in February 1917.

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In early 1915, the Germans sank three American ships; President Wilson took the view, based on some reasonable evidence, that these incidents were accidental, and a settlement of claims could be postponed until the end of the war.

President Wilson demanded that the German government "take immediate steps to prevent the recurrence" of incidents like the sinking of the Lusitania.

President Wilson extracted from Germany a pledge to constrain submarine warfare to the rules of cruiser warfare, which represented a major diplomatic concession.

President Wilson was deeply affected by the loss, falling into depression.

President Wilson was renominated at the 1916 Democratic National Convention without opposition.

President Wilson favored a minimum wage for all work performed by and for the federal government.

President Wilson was able to win by picking up many votes that had gone to Roosevelt or Debs in 1912.

President Wilson swept the Solid South and won all but a handful of Western states, while Hughes won most of the Northeastern and Midwestern states.

President Wilson's re-election made him the first Democrat since Andrew Jackson to win two consecutive terms.

President Wilson sought the establishment of "an organized common peace" that would help prevent future conflicts.

On January 8,1918, President Wilson delivered a speech, known as the Fourteen Points, wherein he articulated his administration's long term war objectives.

President Wilson called for the establishment of an association of nations to guarantee the independence and territorial integrity of all nations—a League of Nations.

Meanwhile, French and British leaders convinced President Wilson to send a few thousand American soldiers to join the Allied intervention in Russia, which was in the midst of a civil war between the Communist Bolsheviks and the White movement.

President Wilson called on voters in the 1918 off-year elections to elect Democrats as an endorsement of his policies.

President Wilson refused to coordinate or compromise with the new leaders of House and Senate—Senator Henry Cabot Lodge became his nemesis.

President Wilson had an illness during the conference, and some experts believe the Spanish flu was the cause.

Unlike other Allied leaders, President Wilson did not seek territorial gains or material concessions from the Central Powers.

President Wilson himself presided over the committee that drafted the Covenant of the League of Nations.

Japan proposed that the conference endorse a racial equality clause; President Wilson was indifferent to the issue, but acceded to strong opposition from Australia and Britain.

However, in pursuit of his League of Nations, President Wilson conceded several points to the other powers present at the conference.

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President Wilson agreed to allowing the Allied European powers and Japan to essentially expand their empires by establishing de facto colonies in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia out the former German and Ottoman Empires; these territorial awards to the victorious countries were thinly disguised as "League of Nations mandates".

President Wilson was unable to convince the other Allied powers, France in particular, to temper the harshness of the settlement being leveled at the defeated Central Powers, especially Germany.

President Wilson consistently refused to compromise, partly due to concerns about having to re-open negotiations with the other treaty signatories.

When Lodge was on the verge of building a two-thirds majority to ratify the Treaty with ten reservations, President Wilson forced his supporters to vote Nay on March 19,1920, thereby closing the issue.

On October 2,1919, President Wilson suffered a serious stroke, leaving him paralyzed on his left side, and with only partial vision in the right eye.

President Wilson was confined to bed for weeks and sequestered from everyone except his wife and his physician, Dr Cary Grayson.

President Wilson's mind remained relatively clear; but he was physically enfeebled, and the disease had wrecked his emotional constitution and aggravated all his more unfortunate personal traits.

In mid-March 1920, Lodge and his Republicans formed a coalition with the pro-treaty Democrats to pass a treaty with reservations, but President Wilson rejected this compromise and enough Democrats followed his lead to defeat ratification.

In October 1919, President Wilson vetoed the Volstead Act, legislation designed to enforce Prohibition, but his veto was overridden by Congress.

President Wilson personally opposed women's suffrage in 1911 because he believed women lacked the public experience needed to be good voters.

President Wilson did not speak publicly on the issue except to echo the Democratic Party position that suffrage was a state matter, primarily because of strong opposition in the white South to Black voting rights.

President Wilson continually pressured the Senate to vote for the amendment, telling senators that its ratification was vital to winning the war.

President Wilson largely stayed out of the campaign, although he endorsed Cox and continued to advocate for US membership in the League of Nations.

President Wilson met with Harding for tea on his last day in office, March 3,1921.

On December 10,1920, President Wilson was awarded the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize "for his role as founder of the League of Nations".

In 1921, President Wilson opened a law practice with former Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby.

President Wilson showed up the first day but never returned, and the practice was closed by the end of 1922.

On November 10,1923, President Wilson made his last national address, delivering a short Armistice Day radio speech from the library of his home.

President Wilson's health did not markedly improve after leaving office, declining rapidly in January 1924.

President Wilson was interred in Washington National Cathedral, being the only president whose final resting place lies within the nation's capital.

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President Wilson was born and raised in the South by parents who were committed supporters of both slavery and the Confederacy.

Academically, President Wilson was an apologist for slavery and the Redeemers, and one of the foremost promoters of the Lost Cause mythology.

At Princeton, President Wilson actively dissuaded the admission of African-Americans as students.

Oswald Garrison Villard, who later became an opponent of his, initially thought that President Wilson was not a bigot and supported progress for black people, and he was frustrated by southern opposition in the Senate, to which President Wilson capitulated.

President Wilson appointed a total of nine African-Americans to prominent positions in the federal bureaucracy, eight of whom were Republican carry-overs.

Since 1863, the US mission to Haiti and Santo Domingo was almost always led by an African-American diplomat regardless of what party the sitting president belonged to; Wilson ended this half-century-old tradition but continued to appoint black diplomats like George Washington Buckner, as well as Joseph L Johnson, to head the mission to Liberia.

President Wilson's administration escalated the discriminatory hiring policies and segregation of government offices that had begun under Theodore Roosevelt and continued under Taft.

President Wilson did not adopt Burleson's proposal but allowed Cabinet Secretaries discretion to segregate their respective departments.

President Wilson is generally regarded as a key figure in the establishment of modern American liberalism, and a strong influence on future presidents such as Franklin D Roosevelt and Lyndon B Johnson.

Many of President Wilson's accomplishments, including the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, the graduated income tax, and labor laws, continued to influence the United States long after President Wilson's death.

In 2018, conservative columnist George Will wrote in The Washington Post that Theodore Roosevelt and President Wilson were the "progenitors of today's imperial presidency".

Notwithstanding his accomplishments in office, President Wilson has received criticism for his record on race relations and civil liberties, for his interventions in Latin America, and for his failure to win ratification of the Treaty of Versailles.

Prospect House, President Wilson's residence during part of his tenure at Princeton, is a National Historic Landmark.

The Woodrow President Wilson National Fellowship Foundation is a non-profit that provides grants for teaching fellowships.

The Woodrow President Wilson Foundation was established to honor President Wilson's legacy but was terminated in 1993.