On the right, losing incumbent William Howard Taft congratulates incoming President Woodrow Wilson at the latter's inauguration in Washington, DC, 1913.
Gallery of Woodrow Wilson
1913
United States
Photograph of Woodrow Wilson and his family during the President's first term. Around 1913.
Gallery of Woodrow Wilson
1915
United States
American politician Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States from 1913-1921, goes over papers at his desk as his second wife Edith Bolling Galt Wilson looks on, the mid-1910s. Edith was often referred to as "secret president" because of the important role she played in Wilson's presidency during his long and debilitating illness following a stroke.
Gallery of Woodrow Wilson
1916
United States
Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States of America playing golf.
Gallery of Woodrow Wilson
1916
United States
Democratic President Woodrow Wilson signing a bill that outlawed the transportation across state lines of the products of child labour.
Gallery of Woodrow Wilson
1919
Place d'Armes, 78000 Versailles, France
At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 are Vittorio Orlando, David Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau, and the United States President Woodrow Wilson.
Gallery of Woodrow Wilson
1919
Paris, France
British Prime Minister Lloyd George, French Premier Georges Clemenceau, and the United States President Woodrow Wilson walk together in Paris during negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles.
Gallery of Woodrow Wilson
1919
United States
Colorized portrait photo of Woodrow Wilson. Photo by Harris & Ewing.
Gallery of Woodrow Wilson
1919
Place d'Armes, 78000 Versailles, France
French Premier Georges Clemenceau, American President Woodrow Wilson, and British Prime Minister Lloyd George after signing the treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I.
Gallery of Woodrow Wilson
1919
United Place d'Armes, 78000 Versailles, France
The American delegation at the Versailles Conference. From left to right: House, Lansing, Wilson, Henry White, General Bliss.
Gallery of Woodrow Wilson
1919
Place d'Armes, 78000 Versailles, France
The "Big Four" at the Versailles Peace Conference, from left to right: Prime Ministers Lloyd-George, Orlando, and Clemenceau, of Great Britain, Italy, and France, respectively, and President Wilson of the United States.
Gallery of Woodrow Wilson
1920
New York City, New York, United States
President Woodrow Wilson with the First Lady, Edith Wilson riding in a carriage in New York. President Wilson was the 28th President of the United States of America.
Gallery of Woodrow Wilson
1912
Trenton, New Jersey, United States
Democrats Woodrow Wilson and William Jennings Bryan pose together, Trenton, New Jersey, December 21, 1912.
Gallery of Woodrow Wilson
1912
United States, New York City, New York, United States
Presidential candidate Woodrow Wilson speaks to a crowd in Union Square.
Gallery of Woodrow Wilson
1908
United States
Woodrow Wilson the 28th President of the United States, with his first wife, Ellen Wilson.
Gallery of Woodrow Wilson
1909
Princeton, NJ 08544, United States
Photograph of Woodrow Wilson, sitting at a roll-top desk at Princeton University, 1909.
Achievements
1923
Woodrow Wilson on the November 12, 1923, Time magazine cover.
Membership
Phi Kappa Psi
Woodrow Wilson was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi.
American Philosophical Society
Woodrow Wilson was a member of the American Philosophical Society.
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Woodrow Wilson was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Lincean Academy
Woodrow Wilson was a member of the Lincean Academy.
Academy of Sciences of Turin
Woodrow Wilson was a member of the Academy of Sciences of Turin.
American Historical Association
Woodrow Wilson was a member of the American Historical Association.
American Academy of Arts and Letters
Woodrow Wilson was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
On the right, losing incumbent William Howard Taft congratulates incoming President Woodrow Wilson at the latter's inauguration in Washington, DC, 1913.
American politician Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States from 1913-1921, goes over papers at his desk as his second wife Edith Bolling Galt Wilson looks on, the mid-1910s. Edith was often referred to as "secret president" because of the important role she played in Wilson's presidency during his long and debilitating illness following a stroke.
British Prime Minister Lloyd George, French Premier Georges Clemenceau, and the United States President Woodrow Wilson walk together in Paris during negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles.
French Premier Georges Clemenceau, American President Woodrow Wilson, and British Prime Minister Lloyd George after signing the treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I.
The "Big Four" at the Versailles Peace Conference, from left to right: Prime Ministers Lloyd-George, Orlando, and Clemenceau, of Great Britain, Italy, and France, respectively, and President Wilson of the United States.
President Woodrow Wilson with the First Lady, Edith Wilson riding in a carriage in New York. President Wilson was the 28th President of the United States of America.
Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics
(The object of this book is to point out the most characte...)
The object of this book is to point out the most characteristic practical features of the federal system. Taking Congress as the central and predominant power of the system, its object is to illustrate everything Congressional. Everybody has seen, and critics without number have said, that our form of the national government is singular, possessing a character altogether its own; but there is abundant evidence that very few have seen just wherein it differs most essentially from the other governments of the world. There have been and are other federal systems quite similar, and scarcely any legislative or administrative principle of our Constitution was young even when that Constitution was framed.
(This biography of the first President, written by a man w...)
This biography of the first President, written by a man who would later become the twenty-eighth, is an insightful look into the career of this famous soldier and politician. Woodrow Wilson’s book begins with a study into the Washington family and the Colony of Virginia under British rule that Washington grew up in. Washington’s life and career are analyzed step-by-step, from his childhood through to his first experience of military action fighting for the British against the French and their Indian allies, where he experienced his first taste of victory, but also that of defeat. Wilson covers Washington’s emergence into the heat of politics and the development of rising tensions with Great Britain. Through this period, Washington forged diplomatic relationships with various important leaders such as Thomas Jefferson and Richard Henry Lee, and with their support, he emerged as a central figure in the fight for American independence and afterwards as the first President.
(Wilson's classic study and re-thinking of government in s...)
Wilson's classic study and re-thinking of government in states and federal organizations such as Congress, the courts, executive agencies, and the presidency - just a few years before he gained that office. While President of Princeton and a professor in political science, Wilson revisited some of his theories from prior books and delivered this life's work on the subject. It is still read, cited, and considered thoughtfully by history buffs, political science students, constitutional lawyers, and many others the world over.
Woodrow Wilson was the 28th president of the United States, an American scholar and statesman best remembered for his legislative accomplishments and his high-minded idealism. Wilson led his country into World War I and became the creator and leading advocate of the League of Nations, for which he was awarded the 1919 Nobel Prize for Peace.
Background
Ethnicity:
Woodrow Wilson was of Scots-Irish and Scottish descent.
Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born on December 28, 1856, in Staunton, Virginia, United States. Wilson’s father, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, was a Presbyterian minister who had moved to Virginia from Ohio and was the son of Scotch-Irish immigrants; his mother, Janet Woodrow, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, had been born in England of Scottish parentage. Wilson was the only president since Andrew Jackson to have a foreign-born parent.
Naturally enough, the Presbyterian church played a commanding role in the upbringing of Wilson. The family left Virginia before his second birthday, as his father successively held pastorates in Augusta, Georgia, and Wilmington, North Carolina, and taught at the Columbia Theological Seminary in South Carolina. His uncle, James Woodrow, was the leading light of the seminary faculty, and after college, the young man dropped his first name both to emphasize the family connection and because he thought "Woodrow Wilson" sounded more dignified. His father served during the Civil War as a chaplain with the Confederate army, and his church in Augusta was turned into a military hospital. The young Wilson was deeply affected by the horrors of the war.
Education
Apparently dyslexic from childhood, Woodrow Wilson did not learn to read until after he was 10 and never became a rapid reader. Nevertheless, he developed passionate interests in politics and literature. Although troubled by weak eyesight and possible dyslexia that delayed his learning to read, Wilson was otherwise a normal boy, playing baseball and energetically exploring Augusta and Columbia with friends and cousins. Public schools scarcely existed in the South of his youth, and while he received some tutoring from former Confederate soldiers who set up primitive schools after the war, most of his early education came from his father, who emphasized religion and British history and literature.
Wilson attended Davidson College near Charlotte, North Carolina, for a year, but illness forced him to leave school the following year. He recovered at the home of his parents, who were living in Wilmington, North Carolina, by then, and he continued his studies on his own there. The family’s large library and his father’s excellent teaching skills had always provided Woodrow with home learning to enrich his public education.
In 1875, Wilson entered Princeton University, which was then called the College of New Jersey, the same school that had educated his father. At Princeton he blossomed intellectually, reading widely, engaging in debate, and editing the college newspaper. While still an undergraduate, he published a scholarly essay that compared the American government with the British parliamentary system, a subject that he would develop further in his first book and apply in his own political career.
After graduation from Princeton in 1879, Wilson studied law at the University of Virginia, with the hope that law would lead to politics, but he suffered a physical breakdown the following year and returned home again. He went back to school but two years of humdrum legal practice in Atlanta disillusioned him, and he abandoned his law career for graduate study in government and history at Johns Hopkins University, where in 1886 he received a Doctor of Philosophy; he was the only president to have earned that degree.
Wilson’s doctoral thesis was also his first book, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics (1885), which further developed his comparison between the American and parliamentary government and suggested reforms that would make the American system more efficient and more answerable to public opinion.
Woodrow Wilson was a professional academic before he became president. He began his career teaching history and political science at Bryn Mawr College in 1885 and moved to Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1888. Two years later he went to Princeton, where he quickly became the most popular and highest-paid faculty member. In 1902 he was the unanimous choice to become president of Princeton. Wilson upgraded the university both financially and intellectually, and he attempted far-reaching reforms of both undergraduate and graduate education. Several of his policies were adopted, but his reforms for restructuring and democratizing the university ran afoul of opposition from faculty conservatives and wealthy alumni and forced him to abandon several of his key plans.
Meanwhile, the publicity that Wilson had generated as Princeton’s president attracted the attention of conservative kingmakers in the Democratic Party, who offered him the 1910 nomination for governor of New Jersey. Wilson resigned from the university, and, artfully turning the tables on his patrons, he won the governorship with a dynamic, progressive campaign. Once in office, he put his earlier ideas about parliamentary practices to work in implementing a sweeping reform program that gave him a national reputation and made him a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Prevailing at the 1912 convention after a hard struggle against better-entrenched rivals, Wilson entered into an exciting three-way race for president. Former president Theodore Roosevelt’s bolt to the Progressive (Bull Moose) Party had split the dominant Republican Party, a factor that allowed Wilson to be elected with only 42 percent of the popular vote but with an electoral college landslide of 435 votes to Roosevelt’s 88 and William Howard Taft’s 8. In that campaign, Wilson answered Roosevelt’s call for a "New Nationalism" with his own equally compelling vision of a "New Freedom." Wilson was the first Southern-born president elected since the Civil War.
The outbreak of World War I in August 1914, which coincided with the death of his wife, Ellen, tried Wilson’s mind and soul. Almost no one questioned American neutrality in the beginning, but both the British blockade of maritime trade and German U-boat attacks soon made neutrality painful. On May 7, 1915, when a U-boat sank the British liner Lusitania, killing more than 1,100 people, including 128 Americans, the war came home with a vengeance. Wilson at first urged his countrymen to show restraint, declaring, "There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight," but he also pressed the Germans to rein in their submarines and decided to build up the armed forces. Those moves impelled Bryan to resign in protest and to oppose Wilson politically. A combination of patience and firmness on the president’s part paid off when the Germans, for military reasons of their own, pledged to curtail submarine warfare in April 1916. For the rest of that year, the threat of war receded, while relations with Great Britain worsened because of their ever-tightening blockade and their brutal suppression of the Easter Rising, the armed revolt in Ireland that eventually led to independence.
Wilson prevailed in the 1916 election, becoming the first Democrat to win a second consecutive term since Andrew Jackson. His narrow victory by 277 to 254 electoral votes over Charles Evans Hughes, the nominee of the reunited and resurgent Republicans, was a great political feat. The campaign cry "He kept us out of war" helped, but Wilson’s domestic record on progressive and labor issues played the biggest part in his achieving a healthy plurality in the popular vote and a small electoral margin.
His reelection assured Wilson mounted a peace offensive in December 1916 and January 1917 aimed at ending the world war. First, he made a public diplomatic appeal to the belligerent countries to state their peace terms and accept American mediation, and then on January 22, he gave a stirring speech in which he called for a "peace without victory" and pledged to establish a league of nations to prevent future wars.
Unfortunately, the Germans rendered Wilson’s peace efforts moot by unleashing their submarines on February 1. For the next two months, Wilson agonized over how to respond. Public opinion remained divided and uncertain, even after publication of the Zimmermann Telegram, a secret communication by the German foreign secretary that offered Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to Mexico in return for going to war against the United States. Wilson finally decided to intervene, mainly because he could see no alternative and hoped to use American belligerency as a means to build a just, lasting peace. On April 2, 1917, he went before Congress to ask for a declaration of war so that the United States could strive to fulfill his injunction that "the world must be made safe for democracy."
Wilson proved to be a surprisingly effective war president. Recognizing what he did not know, he delegated military decisions to professional soldiers, particularly General John J. Pershing, who commanded the American Expeditionary Force in France, and economic mobilization to such men as Bernard Baruch, William Gibbs McAdoo, and Herbert Hoover. Careful planning also ensured the success of the Selective Service Act (see Selective Service Acts), which became law in May. This helped to raise the strength of the armed forces to five million men and women, two million of whom reached France by the war’s end. The boost given to the Allies by American money, supplies, and manpower tipped the scales against the Germans, who sued for peace and laid down their arms with the Armistice of November 11, 1918.
Sheep grazing on the White House lawn to reduce groundskeeping costs during World War I, Washington, D.C., circa 1917.
A less happy side to Wilson’s delegation of war-making tasks came at home, where some of his cabinet members, most notably United States Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, brutally suppressed dissent. The overzealous hounding of radical groups, aliens, and dissidents both during the war and in the Red Scare of 1919-1920 was justified on grounds of national security but was condemned by civil libertarians and ultimately discredited. Diplomacy was the one job that Wilson kept to himself. He seized the initiative on war aims with his Fourteen Points speech of January 8, 1918, in which he promised a liberal, nonpunitive peace and a league of nations. Determined to keep those promises, Wilson made the controversial decision to go in person to the Paris Peace Conference, where he spent seven months in wearying, often acrimonious negotiations with the British, French, and Italians. The final product, the Treaty of Versailles, was signed on June 28, 1919. The treaty’s financial and territorial terms severely compromised Wilson’s aims, but those were offset by its inclusion of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which he believed would adjust international differences and maintain peace.
Wilson returned from the peace conference exhausted and in failing health, in no shape to face the biggest fight of his career. Republican senators, led by Henry Cabot Lodge, sought either to reject the treaty or to attach reservations that would gravely limit America’s commitments to the League of Nations. After two months of frustrating talks with senators, Wilson took his case to the people in September 1919 in the hope of shaping public opinion on this important issue of the day. A master of the English language and public oratory, he threw himself into a whirlwind cross-country tour, giving 39 speeches in three weeks. This resulted in serious health problems for Wilson leaving him partially paralyzed.
This was the worst crisis of presidential disability in American history, and it was handled badly. No one seriously suggested that Wilson resign. His wife, Edith, controlled access to him, made decisions by default and engineered a cover-up of his condition, which included misleadingly optimistic reports from his doctors. Although he gradually recovered from the worst effects of the stroke, Wilson never again fully functioned as president.
The peace treaty went down to defeat in the Senate, as a consequence of Wilson’s stroke-induced rigidity. He demanded that Democratic senators spurn all efforts at compromise with Lodge and the Republicans. Twice, on November 19, 1919, and March 19, 1920, the Treaty of Versailles failed to gain the two-thirds vote necessary for ratification. Later, under Warren G. Harding, Wilson’s Republican successor, the United States made a separate peace with Germany, something Wilson had believed "would place ineffable stain upon the gallantry and honor of the United States." The United States never joined the League of Nations.
In the 1920 election, Wilson called for "a great and solemn referendum" on the treaty and the League of Nations and entertained fantasies about running on that issue himself. Edith Wilson and his closest friends quietly scotched those notions. Instead, the Democrats nominated James M. Cox, the governor of Ohio, on the strength of his lack of association with Wilson, although an administration loyalist, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, received the vice-presidential nomination. The election did become a referendum on Wilson, as Harding called for a return to "normalcy" and blamed all the country’s troubles on the man in the White House. The Republicans won a landslide victory, which they interpreted as a mandate to reverse Wilson’s progressive policies at home and his internationalism abroad.
Wilson lived in Washington for almost three years after leaving office in March 1921. Though an invalid, he never wavered in his conviction that the United States should and would eventually join the League of Nations, and he took a keen interest in politics. In one of his last public appearances, he rode in the funeral procession of his younger and supposedly healthy successor, Harding. Wilson died in his sleep at his Washington home. His remains were interred in the newly begun National Cathedral; he is the only president buried in the capital city. His historical reputation at first suffered from his failure to carry the day in his last years and the ascendancy of the Republicans, and it declined further during the 1930s with the "revisionist" revulsion against World War I. But during World War II Wilson’s reputation soared, as he came to be regarded as a wrongly unheeded prophet whose policies would have prevented world calamity. The United Nations and collective security pacts are viewed as the fulfillment of Wilson’s internationalist vision.
Naturally enough, the Presbyterian church played a commanding role in the upbringing of Wilson. Wilson, whose father was a theologian, had an upbringing steeped in religion and remained deeply religious throughout his life. Wilson in 1873 became a communicant member of the Columbia First Presbyterian Church in South Carolina and remained a member throughout his life.
Politics
Wilson declared his support for the Democratic Party in 1876 and since then was involved in its activities.
The presidency offered Wilson his supreme chance to put his ideas about government to work. Admitting that he intended to conduct himself as a prime minister, he drew up a legislative program in advance, broke with previous presidential practice by appearing before Congress in person, and worked mainly through his party. Important help in keeping congressional Democrats in line came from the party’s three-time unsuccessful presidential nominee, William Jennings Bryan, whom Wilson appointed secretary of state. Indispensable policy advice came from the controversial Boston attorney Louis Brandeis, who had helped Wilson formulate the New Freedom agenda during the campaign. Wilson also kept Congress in session continually from April 1913 to October 1914, almost a year and a half, something that had never before happened, not even during the Civil War.
Wilson’s approach achieved spectacular results. He won his first victory with the passage of the Underwood-Simmons Tariff (1913), which reduced duties on imports for the first time in 40 years. Accompanying the new tariff, to offset lost revenues, was an income tax, which was permitted under the recently adopted Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Wilson’s second victory came when, after months of complicated debate and bargaining over banking and currency reform, Congress in 1913 passed the act creating the Federal Reserve System, which remains the most powerful government agency in economic affairs. A third victory came with the passage of the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914), which strengthened existing laws against anticompetitive business actions and gave labor unions relief from court injunctions. Accompanying this act was the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, which created the Federal Trade Commission, a major agency overseeing business practices.
Wilson followed those legislative accomplishments with a second wave of reform measures in 1916. In part to attract Roosevelt’s Progressive voters of 1912, he pushed through Congress laws to create an agency to regulate overseas shipping, to make the first government loans to farmers, to prohibit child labor, to raise income and inheritance taxes, and to mandate an eight-hour workday for railroad workers. Wilson also nominated Brandeis to a justiceship on the Supreme Court and successfully fought for his confirmation in the Senate. Brandeis, who served until 1939, was the first Jewish justice and became a major force on the Supreme Court. These victories were even more impressive than the earlier ones, because losses in the 1914 elections had reduced the Democrats' majorities in Congress and because the Republicans' opposition had hardened.
Foreign affairs bedeviled Wilson from his first days in the White House. Latin America was the first trouble spot. Though critical of previous Republican interventionism in that region, Wilson and Bryan soon followed the same course, occupying Haiti and the Dominican Republic and governing them as protectorates. Mexico, which was torn by revolution and counterrevolution, proved most vexing of all. First adopting a policy of "watchful waiting" and then seeking to overthrow the military dictatorship of Victoriano Huerta only dragged the United States into interventions by the navy at Veracruz in 1914 and by the army in 1916 in a "punitive expedition" to chase the guerrilla leader Pancho Villa, who had raided across the border into New Mexico. Wilson eventually reconciled himself to a hands-off stance toward Mexico.
Wilson entered the White House just as the women’s suffrage movement was gaining full steam. Though he was initially "lukewarm" towards a women’s right to vote, historians generally agree that his views of suffrage evolved and he eventually supported the cause.
In 1917, a group of suffragists picketed outside the White House demanding Wilson’s support. The group was peaceful but soon turned violent, with many protesters arrested and thrown in jail. At first, Wilson was outraged by the women’s conduct, but he was appalled to learn that some had gone on a hunger strike and were being force-fed by the police. In a speech before the Senate in January 1918, Wilson publicly endorsed a woman’s right to vote.
Joining his daughter, Jessie Woodrow Wilson Sayre, Wilson continued to speak for the cause and contacted members of Congress with personal and written appeals. Finally, on August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified by a two-thirds majority of the states.
Views
Despite Wilson's Southern birth and upbringing, he held racial views that mirrored the then prevailing indifference of white Northerners toward injustices meted out to African Americans. Several of Wilson’s cabinet members were Southerners, however, and they demanded that segregation be introduced into the federal government. Wilson permitted such efforts to go forward. Protests by the recently formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) compelled the administration to drop some of the most blatantly discriminatory measures, such as "white" and "colored" restrooms. Some Northern Democrats and Republican Progressives, whose support Wilson valued, had also raised objections, and practical problems arose in separating the races in the workplace. Taken together, those protests, objections, and problems prompted the administration to stage a partial formal retreat while maintaining much of the substance of segregation. In a similar vein, the numbers and percentages of African Americans in the federal workforce were sharply reduced - a practice that continued under Northern-dominated Republican administrations in the 1920s. Wilson further soured his relations with African Americans by permitting a well-publicized White House screening of D.W. Griffith’s artistically ambitious but overtly racist film The Birth of a Nation (1915). The only move Wilson made toward improving race relations came in July 1918, during his second term, when he eloquently but belatedly condemned lynching.
As President of the United States, Wilson appointed a number of Southern Democrats to his Cabinet. Together with their allies in Congress, members of his administration rolled back many of the advancements African Americans had made in government employment since the Civil War. In several departments including Treasury, the Navy, and the Post Office, Jim Crow policies were implemented, instituting segregated toilets, cafeterias, and even some "whites only" buildings. These policies extended to other areas of the District as well. Though never advocating these practices, Wilson did not oppose them either.
Perhaps the most telling account about Wilson’s racist attitude came from his own lips. "Segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen," said during a meeting with civil-rights leader William Monroe Trotter in November 1914.
Quotations:
"I yield to no one precedence in love for the South. But because I love the South, I rejoice in the failure of the Confederacy."
"We grow great by dreams."
"The object of education is not merely to draw out the powers of the individual mind: it is rather its right object to draw all minds to a proper adjustment to the physical and social world in which they are to have their life and their development: to enlighten, strengthen and make fit."
"Nothing is easier than to falsify the past. Lifeless instruction will do it. If you rob it of vitality, stiffen it with pedantry, sophisticate it with argument, chill it with unsympathetic comment, you render it as dead as any academic exercise."
"Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned."
"Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it."
"Power consists in one's capacity to link his will with the purpose of others, to lead by reason and a gift of cooperation."
"The success of a party means little except when the Nation is using that party for a large and definite purpose."
Membership
Woodrow Wilson was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Lincean Academy, the Academy of Sciences of Turin, the American Historical Association, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Phi Kappa Psi
,
United States
American Philosophical Society
,
United States
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
,
United States
Lincean Academy
,
Italy
Academy of Sciences of Turin
,
Italy
American Historical Association
,
United States
American Academy of Arts and Letters
,
United States
Personality
Wilson was an automobile enthusiast and, while President, he took daily rides in his favorite car, a 1919 Pierce-Arrow. His enjoyment of motoring made him an advocate of funding for public highways. Wilson was an avid baseball fan, and in 1915 became the first sitting president to attend and throw out the first ball at a World Series game. Wilson had been a center fielder during his Davidson College days and was the Princeton team's assistant manager. He cycled regularly, taking several cycling vacations in the English Lake District. Wilson later took up golf. Wilson was a great lover of detective fiction.
Physical Characteristics:
Health problems recurred throughout Wilson's life, and although he grew up to be tall and dignified-looking, he had continual problems with his breathing and blood circulation.
In 1919, Wilson returned from the Paris Peace Conference exhausted and in failing health which was even worsened by his fight with senators. The strain, both mental and physical, was too much for him. He had a near breakdown on September 25, after which his doctor canceled the rest of his cross-country tour and rushed him back to Washington. On October 2, 1919, Wilson suffered a massive stroke that left him partially paralyzed on his left side. His intellectual capacity was not affected, but his emotional balance and judgment were badly impaired.
Quotes from others about the person
"Where Coolidge stood on the race issue is clear, but he did not take any concrete steps to ease the burden of discrimination. Nevertheless, the conservative Coolidge has had a far better press on the race issue than the progressive Woodrow Wilson, who was one of the most bigoted persons ever to hold the nation's highest office." - Robert Springer, an American author
"Wilson's principles survived the eclipse of the Versailles system and that they still guide European politics today: self-determination, democratic government, collective security, international law, and a league of nations. Wilson may not have gotten everything he wanted at Versailles, and his treaty was never ratified by the Senate, but his vision and his diplomacy, for better or worse, set the tone for the twentieth century. France, Germany, Italy, and Britain may have sneered at Wilson, but every one of these powers today conducts its European policy along Wilsonian lines. What was once dismissed as visionary is now accepted as fundamental. This was no mean achievement, and no European statesman of the twentieth century has had as lasting, as benign, or as widespread an influence." - Walter Russell Mead, an American academic and journalist
"Wilson, the first college president to occupy the White House, banned blacks from government restrooms, was the first president to openly attack the United States Constitution and eagerly support laws to prosecute and imprison those who disagreed with his policies. His hostility to black Americans was matched only by his antipathy toward Italian, German and Irish Americans and his desire to rid the nation of those he referred to dismissively as "hyphenated Americans" and against who he railed incessantly." - David Keene, an American political consultant, former Presidential advisor, and newspaper editor
Interests
cycling, cars
Politicians
Samuel Jones Tilden, John McAuley Palmer
Writers
Anna Katharine Green, Emile Gaboriau
Sport & Clubs
football, baseball, golf
Connections
In 1885 Woodrow Wilson married Ellen Louise Axson (Ellen Wilson), the daughter of a Presbyterian minister from Rome, Georgia, with whom he had three daughters, Margaret, Jessie, and Eleanor. The marriage was warm and happy, although it was shadowed by Ellen’s bouts of depression and Wilson’s brief extramarital affair with Mary Hulbert Peck. Ellen’s death in August 1914 devastated Wilson with grief, which lifted only when he met and courted Edith Bolling Galt (Edith Wilson), whom he married in December 1915.