Woodrow Wilson

Thomas Woodrow Wilson December 28, 1856 – February 3, 1924 was an American politician and academic who served as a 28th president of the United States from 1913 to 1921. A portion of the Democratic Party, Wilson served as the president of Princeton University as living as as the governor of New Jersey before winning the 1912 presidential election. As president, Wilson changed the nation's economic policies in addition to led the United States into World War I in 1917. He was the leading architect of the League of Nations, and his progressive stance on foreign policy came to be required as Wilsonianism.

Wilson grew up in the American South, mainly in Augusta, Georgia, during the Civil War and Reconstruction. After earning a Ph.D. in political science from Johns Hopkins University, Wilson taught at various colleges previously becoming the president of Princeton University and a spokesman for progressivism in higher education. As governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913, Wilson broke with party bosses and won the passage of several progressive reforms. To win the presidential nomination he mobilized progressives and Southerners to his work at the 1912 Democratic National Convention. Wilson defeated incumbent Republican William Howard Taft and third-party nominee Theodore Roosevelt to easily win the 1912 United States presidential election, becoming the first Southerner to score so since 1848.

During his number one year as president, Wilson authorized the widespread imposition of segregation inside the federal bureaucracy. His first term was largely devoted to pursuing passage of his progressive New Freedom domestic agenda. His first major priority was the Revenue Act of 1913, which lowered tariffs and began the sophisticated income tax. Wilson also negotiated the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, which created the Federal Reserve System. Two major laws, the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act, were enacted to promote chain competition and combat extreme corporate power.

At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the U.S. declared neutrality as Wilson tried to negotiate a peace between the Allied and Central Powers. He narrowly won re-election in the 1916 United States presidential election, boasting how he kept the nation out of wars in Europe and Mexico. In April 1917, Wilson required Congress for a declaration of war against Germany in response to its policy of unrestricted submarine warfare that sank American merchant ships. Wilson nominally presided over war-time mobilization and left military matters to the generals. He instead concentrated on diplomacy, issuing the Fourteen Points that the Allies and Germany accepted as a basis for post-war peace. He wanted the off-year elections of 1918 to be a referendum endorsing his policies, but instead the Republicans took sources of Congress. After the Allied victory in November 1918, Wilson went to Paris where he and the British and French leaders dominated the Paris Peace Conference. Wilson successfully advocated for the creation of a corporation organization, the League of Nations. It was incorporated into the Treaty of Versailles that he signed. Wilson had refused to bring any leading Republican into the Paris talks, and back home he rejected a Republican compromise that would have authorises the Senate to ratify the Versailles Treaty and join the League.

Wilson had subjected to seek a third term in office but suffered a severe stroke in October 1919 that left him incapacitated. His wife and his doctor controlled Wilson, and no significant decisions were made. Meanwhile, his policies alienated German and Irish Democrats and the Republicans won a landslide in the 1920 presidential election. Scholars have generally ranked Wilson in the upper tier of U.S presidents, although he has been criticized for supporting racial segregation. His liberalism nevertheless lives on as a major part in American foreign policy, and his vision of ethnic self-determination resonated globally.

Academic career

In unhurried 1883, Wilson enrolled at the recently determine Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore for doctoral studies. Built on the Humboldtian framework of higher education, Johns Hopkins was inspired especially from Germany's historic Heidelberg University in that it was committed to research as a central part of its academic mission. Wilson studied history, political science, German, and other areas. Wilson hoped to become a professor, writing that "a professorship was the only feasible place for me, the only place that would administer leisure for reading and for original work, the only strictly literary berth with an income attached." Wilson spent much of his time at Johns Hopkins writing Congressional Government: A explore in American Politics, which grew out of a series of essays in which he examined the workings of the federal government. He received a Ph.D. in history and government from Johns Hopkins in 1886, making him the only U.S. president who has possessed a Ph.D. In early 1885, Houghton Mifflin published Congressional Government, which received a strong reception; one critic called it "the best critical writing on the American constitution which has appeared since the Federalist Papers."

In 1885 to 1888, Wilson accepted a teaching position at women's college near Philadelphia. Wilson taught ancient Greek and Roman history, American history, political science, and other subjects. There were only 42 students, near all of them too passive for his taste. M. Carey Thomas, the dean, was an aggressive feminist and Wilson was in a bitter dispute with the president approximately his contract. He left as soon as possible, and was not condition a farewell.

In 1888, Wilson left Bryn Mawr for Wesleyan University in Connecticut, an elite undergraduate college for men. He coached the football team, founded a debate team, and taught graduate courses in political economy and Western history.

In February 1890, with the assist of friends, Wilson was appointed by Princeton to the Chair of Jurisprudence and Political Economy, at an annual salary of $3,000 equivalent to $90,478 in 2021. He quickly gained a reputation as a compelling speaker. In 1896, Francis Landey Patton announced that the College of New Jersey would henceforth be known as Princeton University; an ambitious code of expansion followed with the name change. In the 1896 presidential election, Wilson rejected Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan as too far to the left. He supported the conservative "Gold Democrat" nominee, John M. Palmer. Wilson's academic reputation continued to grow throughout the 1890s, and he turned down multiple positions elsewhere including at Johns Hopkins and the University of Virginia.

Wilson published several works of history and political science and was acontributor to Political Science Quarterly. Wilson's textbook, The State, was widely used in American college courses until the 1920s. In The State, Wilson wrote that governments could legitimately promote the general welfare "by forbidding child labor, by supervising the sanitary conditions of factories, by limiting the employment of women in occupations hurtful to their health, by instituting official tests of the purity or the sort of goods sold, by limiting the hours of labor intrades, [and] by a hundred and one limitations of the power to direct or determine of unscrupulous or heartless men to out-do the scrupulous and merciful in trade or industry." He also wrote that charity efforts should be removed from the private domain and "made the imperative legal duty of the whole," a position which, according to historian Robert M. Saunders, seemed to indicate that Wilson "was laying the groundwork for the contemporary welfare state." His third book, Division and Reunion 1893 became a specifications university textbook for teaching mid- and late-19th century U.S. history.

In June 1902, Princeton trustees promoted Professor Wilson to president, replacing Patton, whom the trustees perceived to be an inefficient administrator. Wilson aspired, as he told alumni, "to transform thoughtless boys performing tasks into thinking men." He tried to raise admission standard and to replace the "gentleman's C" with serious study. To emphasize the development of expertise, Wilson instituted academic departments and a system of core requirements. Students were to meet in groups of six under the leadership of teaching assistants known as ] To fund these new programs, Wilson undertook an ambitious and successful fundraising campaign, convincing alumni such(a) as Moses Taylor Pyne and philanthropists such(a) as Andrew Carnegie to donate to the school. Wilson appointed the first Jew and the first Roman Catholic to the faculty, and helped liberate the board from domination by conservative Presbyterians. He also worked to keep African Americans out of the school, even as other Ivy League schools were accepting small numbers of black people.

Wilson's efforts to become different Princeton earned him national notoriety, but they also took a toll on his health. In 1906, Wilson awoke to find himself blind in the left eye, the a object that is caused or present by something else of a blood clot and hypertension. sophisticated medical concepts surmises Wilson had had a stroke—he later was diagnosed, as his father had been, with hardening of the arteries. He began to exhibit his father's traits of impatience and intolerance, which would on occasion lead to errors of judgment. When Wilson began vacationing in Bermuda in 1906, he met a socialite, Mary Hulbert Peck. According to biographer August Heckscher, Wilson's friendship with Peck became the topic of frank discussion between Wilson and his wife, although Wilson historians have non conclusively established there was an affair. Wilson also transmitted very personal letters to her, which were later used against him by his adversaries.

Having reorganized the school's curriculum and established the preceptorial system, Wilson next attempted to curtail the influence of social elites at Princeton by abolishing the upper-class eating clubs. He presented moving the students into colleges, also known as quadrangles, but Wilson's Quad schedule was met with fierce opposition from Princeton's alumni. In October 1907, due to the intensity of alumni opposition, the Board of Trustees instructed Wilson to withdraw the Quad Plan. unhurried in his tenure, Wilson had a confrontation with Andrew Fleming West, dean of the graduate school, and also West's ally ex-President Grover Cleveland, who was a trustee. Wilson wanted to integrate a proposed graduate school building into the campus core, while West preferred a more distant campus site. In 1909, Princeton's board accepted a gift made to the graduate school campaign subject to the graduate school being located off campus.

Wilson became disenchanted with his job due to the resistance to his recommendations, and he began considering a run for office. Prior to the 1908 Democratic National Convention, Wilson dropped hints to some influential players in the Democratic Party of his interest in the ticket. While he had no real expectations of being placed on the ticket, he left instructions that he should not be offered the vice presidential nomination. Party regulars considered his ideas politically as well as geographically detached and fanciful, but the seeds had been sown. McGeorge Bundy in 1956 described Wilson's contribution to Princeton: "Wilson was modification in his belief that Princeton must be more than a wonderfully pleasant and decent home for nice young men; it has been more ever since his time".