Woodrow Wilson's - Vision

Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856 – February 3, 1924) was an American politician and academic who served as the 28th President of the United States from 1913 to 1921. Born in Staunton, Virginia, he spent his early years in Augusta, Georgia and Columbia, South Carolina. Wilson earned a PhD in political science at Johns Hopkins University, and served as a professor and scholar at various institutions before being chosen as President of Princeton University, a position he held from 1902 to 1910. In the election of 1910, he was the gubernatorial candidate of New Jersey's Democratic Party, and was elected the 34th Governor of New Jersey, serving from 1911 to 1913. Running for president in 1912, Wilson benefited from a split in the Republican Party, which enabled his plurality of just over forty percent to win him a large Electoral College margin. He was the first Southerner elected as president since 1848, and Wilson was a leading force in the Progressive Movement, bolstered by his Democratic Party's winning control of both the White House and Congress in 1912.

In office, Wilson reintroduced the spoken State of the Union, which had been out of use since 1801. Leading the Congress, now in Democratic hands, he oversaw the passage of progressive legislative policies unparalleled until the New Deal in 1933. Included among these were the Federal Reserve Act, Federal Trade Commission Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, and the Federal Farm Loan Act. Having taken office one month after ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, Wilson called a special session of Congress, whose work culminated in the Revenue Act of 1913, reintroducing an income tax and lowering tariffs. Through passage of the Adamson Act, imposing an 8-hour workday for railroads, he averted a railroad strike and an ensuing economic crisis. Upon the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Wilson maintained a policy of neutrality, while pursuing a more aggressive policy in dealing with Mexico's civil war.

Wilson faced former New York Governor Charles Evans Hughes in the presidential election of 1916. By a narrow margin, he became the first Democrat since Andrew Jackson elected to two consecutive terms. Wilson's second term was dominated by American entry into World War I. In April 1917, when Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, Wilson asked Congress to declare war in order to make "the world safe for democracy." The United States conducted military operations alongside the Allies, although without a formal alliance. Also in 1917, he denied sanctuary to Tsarist Russia's Nicholas II and his immediate family when Nicholas was overthrown in that year's February Revolution and forced into abdication that March, a decision that became controversial the following year with the shooting of the Romanov family in 1918. During the war, Wilson focused on diplomacy and financial considerations, leaving military strategy to the generals, especially General John J. Pershing. Loaning billions of dollars to Britain, France, and other Allies, the United States aided their finance of the war effort. Through the Selective Service Act, conscription sent 10,000 freshly trained soldiers to France, per day, by summer of 1918. On the home front, he raised income taxes, borrowing billions of dollars through the public's purchase of Liberty Bonds. He set up the War Industries Board, promoted labor union cooperation, regulating agriculture and food production through the Lever Act, and granting to the Secretary of the Treasury, William McAdoo, direct control of the nation's railroad system.

In his 1915 State of the Union, Wilson asked Congress for what became the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, suppressing anti-draft activists. The crackdown was intensified by his Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to include expulsion of non-citizen radicals during the First Red Scare of 1919–1920. Following years of advocacy for suffrage on the state level, in 1918 he endorsed the Nineteenth Amendment whose ratification provided all women the right to vote by its ratification in 1920, over Southern opposition. Wilson staffed his government with Southern Democrats who believed in segregation. He gave department heads greater autonomy in their management. Early in 1918, he issued his principles for peace, the Fourteen Points, and in 1919, following armistice, he traveled to Paris, promoting the formation of a League of Nations, concluding the Treaty of Versailles. Following his return from Europe, Wilson embarked on a nationwide tour in 1919 to campaign for the treaty, suffering a severe stroke. The treaty was met with serious concern by Senate Republicans, and Wilson rejected a compromise effort led by Henry Cabot Lodge, leading to the Senate's rejection of the treaty. Due to his stroke, Wilson secluded himself in the White House, disability having diminished his power and influence. Forming a strategy for reelection, Wilson deadlocked the 1920 Democratic National Convention, but his bid for a third-term nomination was overlooked.

A devoted Presbyterian, Wilson infused morality into his internationalism, an ideology now referred to as "Wilsonian"—an activist foreign policy calling on the nation to promote global democracy. For his sponsorship of the League of Nations, Wilson was awarded the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize, the second of three sitting presidents so honored.

Wilson was born to an ethnic Scots-Irish family in Staunton, Virginia, on December 28, 1856, at 18–24 North Coalter Street (now the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library). He was the third of four children of Joseph Ruggles Wilson (1822–1903) and Jessie Janet Woodrow (1826–1888). Wilson's paternal grandparents immigrated to the United States from Strabane, County Tyrone, Ireland (now Northern Ireland), in 1807. His mother was born in Carlisle, Cumberland, England, the daughter of Rev. Dr. Thomas Woodrow from Paisley, Scotland, and Marion Williamson from Glasgow. This was one of the Border Counties, which supplied many immigrants to the North American colonies in the late 18th century.

Joseph Wilson's immigrant family settled in Steubenville, Ohio. There his father published a pro-tariff and anti-slavery newspaper, The Western Herald and Gazette.

After marrying, Joseph and Jessie Wilson moved to the South in 1851 and came to fully identify with it, moving from Virginia deeper into the region as Wilson was called to be a minister in Georgia and South Carolina. Joseph Wilson owned slaves, defended slavery, and also set up a Sunday school for his slaves. Both parents identified with the Confederacy during the American Civil War; they cared for wounded soldiers at their church, and Wilson's father briefly served as a chaplain to the Confederate Army. Woodrow Wilson's earliest memory, from the age of three, was of hearing that Abraham Lincoln had been elected and that a war was coming. Wilson would forever recall standing for a moment at General Robert E. Lee's side and looking up into his face.

In 1861 Wilson's father was one of the founders of the Southern Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) after it split from the northern Presbyterians. He served as the first permanent clerk of the southern church's General Assembly, was Stated Clerk for more than three decades from 1865 to 1898, and was Moderator of the PCUS General Assembly in 1879. He became minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Augusta, Georgia, and the family lived there until 1870, when young Wilson was 14. Wilson in 1873 formally became a member of the Columbia First Presbyterian Church in South Carolina and remained a member throughout his life.

Wilson's reading began at age ten, possibly delayed by dyslexia; he later blamed the lack of schools in the post bellum south. As a teen, he taught himself the Graham shorthand system to compensate, and achieved academically with self-discipline, studying at home with his father, then in classes at a small Augusta, Georgia school. During Reconstruction, Wilson lived in Columbia, South Carolina, from 1870 to 1874, while his father was professor at the Columbia Theological Seminary.

His father moved the family to Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1874 where he was the minister at First Presbyterian Church until 1882. Wilson attended Davidson College in North Carolina for the 1873–74 school year, cut short by illness, then transferred to Princeton as a freshman. He graduated in 1879, a member of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. In his second year, he studied political philosophy and history, was active in the Whig literary and debating society, and wrote for the Nassau Literary Review. He organized the Liberal Debating Society and later coached the Whig–Clio Debate Panel. In the hotly contested presidential election of 1876, Wilson declared his support for the Democratic Party and its nominee, Samuel J. Tilden.

In 1879, Wilson attended law school at the University of Virginia for one year; he was involved in the Virginia Glee Club and was president of the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society. While there, he enjoyed frequent trips to his birthplace of Staunton. He visited with cousins, and fell in love with one, Hattie Woodrow, though his affections were unrequited.

His health became frail and dictated withdrawal, he went home to his parents, then living in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he continued his law studies. Wilson was admitted to the Georgia bar and made a brief attempt at law practice in January 1882; he found legal history and substantive jurisprudence interesting, but abhorred the day-to-day procedural aspects. After less than a year, he abandoned the practice to pursue his study of political science and history. Both parents expressed concern over a potentially premature decision.

In the fall of April 1883, Wilson entered Johns Hopkins University to study

 History, political science and the German language. Three years later, he completed his doctoral dissertation, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics, and received a Ph.D.

Wilson was an automobile enthusiast, and took daily rides while he was President 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.