Woodrow Wilson
Portrait, 1919
28th President of the United States
In office March 4, 1913 – March 4, 1921
Vice President	Thomas R. Marshall
Preceded by	William Howard Taft
Succeeded by	Warren G. Harding
34th Governor of New Jersey
In office January 17, 1911 – March 1, 1913
Preceded by	John Franklin Fort
Succeeded by	James Fairman Fielder
13th President of Princeton University
In office October 25, 1902 – October 21, 1910
Preceded by	Francis Landey Patton
Succeeded by	John Grier Hibben
Personal details
Born	Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856-12-28)December 28, 1856 Staunton, Virginia, U.S.
Died	February 3, 1924(1924-02-03) (aged 67) Washington, D.C., U.S.
Resting place	Washington National Cathedral
Political party	Democratic
Spouses	Ellen Axson ​ ​ (m. 1885; died 1914)​ Edith Bolling ​ (m. 1915)​
Children	Margaret Jessie Eleanor
Parents	Joseph Ruggles Wilson Jessie Janet Woodrow
Alma mater	Princeton University (AB) Johns Hopkins University (PhD)
Occupation	Academic politician
Awards	Nobel Peace Prize (1919)
Signature
Scientific career
Fields	Political science
Institutions	Johns Hopkins University
Thesis	Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics (1886)
Woodrow Wilson's voice On democratic principles Recorded August 7, 1912

This article is part of a series about Woodrow Wilson
Early life Boyhood home South Carolina home President of Princeton University New Jersey gubernatorial election 28th President of the United States Presidency Timeline First term 1912 presidential election Convention Transition 1st inauguration Foreign policy Women's suffrage Woman Suffrage Procession The New Freedom Silent Sentinels Federal Reserve Act Clayton Antitrust Act Federal Trade Commission United States occupation of Veracruz Pancho Villa Expedition Coalfield War Daylight saving time Banana Wars Louis Brandeis Supreme Court nomination Second term 1916 presidential election Convention 2nd inauguration 18th Amendment 19th Amendment World War I Foreign policy 1917-1921 Zimmermann Telegram Thrasher incident Entry into war Against Austria-Hungary Against Germany American home front Espionage Act Fourteen Points Wilsonian Armenia Paris Peace Conference Big Four Treaty of Versailles League of Nations Judicial appointments Supreme Court Wilson and race relations Wilson House Princeton School of Public and International Affairs Wilson Center Presidential Library Wilsonianism
v t e

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. A member of the Democratic Party, Wilson served as the president of Princeton University and as the governor of New Jersey before winning the 1912 presidential election. As president, Wilson changed the nation's economic policies and 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 known as Wilsonianism.

Born in Staunton, Virginia, Wilson grew up in the Southern United States, mainly in Augusta, Georgia, during the American Civil War and Reconstruction era. After earning a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in history and political science from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Wilson taught at several colleges prior to being appointed president of Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, where he emerged as a prominent spokesman for progressivism in higher education.

Wilson served as governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913, during which he broke with party bosses and won the passage of several progressive reforms. To win the 1912 presidential nomination he mobilized progressives and Southerners to his cause 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 do so since 1848. During his first year as president, Wilson authorized the widespread imposition of segregation inside the federal bureaucracy. He ousted many African Americans from federal posts and his opposition to women's suffrage drew protests. 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 modern 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 business 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 asked 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 control 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 establishment of a multinational 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 allowed the Senate to ratify the Versailles Treaty and join the League.

Wilson had intended to seek a third term in office but suffered a severe stroke in October 1919 that left him incapacitated. His wife and his physician controlled Wilson, and no significant decisions were made. Meanwhile, his policies alienated German- and Irish-American 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 factor in American foreign policy, and his vision of national self-determination resonates globally to this day.

Early life and education

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born to a family of Scotch-Irish and Scottish descent in Staunton, Virginia.^[1] He was the third of four children and the first son of Joseph Ruggles Wilson and Jessie Janet Woodrow. Wilson's paternal grandparents had immigrated to the United States from Strabane, County Tyrone, Ireland, in 1807, and settled in Steubenville, Ohio. Wilson's paternal grandfather James Wilson published a pro-tariff and anti-slavery newspaper, The Western Herald and Gazette.^[2] Wilson's maternal grandfather, the Reverend Thomas Woodrow, moved from Paisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland, to Carlisle, Cumbria, England, before migrating to Chillicothe, Ohio, in the late 1830s.^[3] Joseph met Jessie while she was attending a girl's academy in Steubenville, and the two married on June 7, 1849. Soon after the wedding, Joseph was ordained as a Presbyterian pastor and assigned to serve in Staunton.^[4] His son Woodrow was born in the Manse, a house in the Staunton First Presbyterian Church where Joseph served. Before he was two years old, the family moved to Augusta, Georgia.^[5]

Wilson's earliest memory of his early youth was of playing in his yard and standing near the front gate of the Augusta parsonage at the age of three, when he heard a passerby announce in disgust that Abraham Lincoln had been elected and that a war was coming.^[5][6] Wilson was one of only two U.S. presidents to be a citizen of the Confederate States of America; the other was John Tyler, who served as the nation's tenth president from 1841 to 1845. Wilson's father identified with the Southern United States and was a staunch supporter of the Confederacy during the American Civil War.^[7]

Wilson's father was one of the founders of the Southern Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) following its 1861 split from the Northern Presbyterians. He became minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Augusta, and the family lived there until 1870.^[8] From 1870 to 1874, Wilson lived in Columbia, South Carolina, where his father was a theology professor at the Columbia Theological Seminary.^[9] In 1873, Wilson became a communicant member of the Columbia First Presbyterian Church; he remained a member throughout his life.^[10]

Wilson attended Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina in the 1873–74 school year but transferred as a freshman to the College of New Jersey, which is now Princeton University,^[11] where he studied political philosophy and history, joined the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, and was active in the Whig literary and debating society.^[12] He was also elected secretary of the school's football association, president of the school's baseball association, and managing editor of the student newspaper.^[13] In the hotly contested presidential election of 1876, Wilson supported the Democratic Party and its nominee, Samuel J. Tilden.^[14]

After graduating from Princeton in 1879,^[15] Wilson attended the University of Virginia School of Law in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he was involved in the Virginia Glee Club and served as president of the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society.^[16] Poor health forced Wilson to withdraw from law school, but he continued to study law on his own while living with his parents in Wilmington, North Carolina.^[17] Wilson was admitted to the Georgia bar and made a brief attempt at establishing a law firm in Atlanta in 1882.^[18] Though he found legal history and substantive jurisprudence interesting, he abhorred the day-to-day procedural aspects of the practice of law. After less than a year, Wilson abandoned his legal practice to pursue the study of political science and history.^[19]

In late 1883, Wilson enrolled at the recently established Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore for doctoral studies.^[20] Built on the Humboldtian model of higher education, Johns Hopkins was inspired particularly from historic Heidelberg University in Germany and was committed to research as central to its academic and institutional mission. Wilson studied history, political science, German, and other fields.^[21] Wilson hoped to become a professor, writing that "a professorship was the only feasible place for me, the only place that would afford leisure for reading and for original work, the only strictly literary berth with an income attached."^[22]

Wilson spent much of his time at Johns Hopkins University writing Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics, which grew out of a series of essays in which he examined the workings of the federal government.^[23] In 1886, Wilson was awarded a Ph.D. in history and government from Johns Hopkins University,^[24] making him the only U.S. president in the nation's history to possess a Ph.D.^[25] In early 1885, Houghton Mifflin published Wilson's Congressional Government, which was well received, with one critic calling it "the best critical writing on the American constitution which has appeared since the 'Federalist' papers."^[26]

Marriage and family

In 1883, Wilson met and fell in love with Ellen Louise Axson.^[27] He proposed marriage in September 1883; she accepted, but they agreed to postpone marriage while Wilson attended graduate school.^[28] Axson graduated from Art Students League of New York, worked in portraiture, and received a medal for one of her works from the Exposition Universelle (1878) in Paris.^[29] She agreed to sacrifice further independent artistic pursuits in order to marry Wilson in 1885.^[30] Ellen learned German so she could help translate German-language political science publications relevant to Woodrow's research.^[31]

In April 1886, the couple's first child, Margaret, was born. Their second child, Jessie, was born in August 1887.^[32] Their third and final child, Eleanor, was born in October 1889.^[33] In 1913, Jessie married Francis Bowes Sayre Sr., who later served as High Commissioner to the Philippines.^[34] In 1914, their third child Eleanor married William Gibbs McAdoo, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under Woodrow Wilson and later a U.S. Senator from California.^[35]

Academic career

Professor

From 1885 to 1888, Wilson taught at Bryn Mawr College, a newly established women's college in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia.^[36] Wilson taught ancient Greek and Roman history, American history, political science, and other subjects. At the time, there were only 42 students at the college, nearly all of them too passive for his taste. M. Carey Thomas, the dean, was a staunch feminist, and Wilson clashed with her over his contract, resulting in a bitter dispute. In 1888, Wilson left Bryn Mawr College and was not given a farewell.^[37]

Wilson accepted a position at Wesleyan University, an elite undergraduate college for men in Middletown, Connecticut. He taught graduate courses in political economy and Western history, coached Wesleyan's football team, and founded a debate team.^[38][39]

In February 1890, with the help of friends, Wilson was appointed Chair of Jurisprudence and Political Economy at the College of New Jersey (the name at the time of Princeton University), at an annual salary of $3,000 (equivalent to $101,733 in 2023).^[40] Wilson quickly earned a reputation at Princeton as a compelling speaker.^[41] In 1896, Francis Landey Patton announced that College of New Jersey was being renamed Princeton University; an ambitious program of expansion for the university accompanied the name change.^[42] In the 1896 presidential election, Wilson rejected Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan as too far to the left and instead supported the conservative "Gold Democrat" nominee, John M. Palmer.^[43] Wilson's academic reputation continued to grow throughout the 1890s, and he turned down multiple positions elsewhere, including at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Virginia.^[44]

At Princeton University, Wilson published several works of history and political science and was a regular contributor to Political Science Quarterly. Wilson's textbook, The State, was widely used in American college courses until the 1920s.^[45] 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 quality of goods sold, by limiting the hours of labor in certain trades, by a hundred and one limitations of the power of unscrupulous or heartless men to out-do the scrupulous and merciful in trade or industry."^[46] 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 modern welfare state."^[47] His third book, Division and Reunion (1893),^[48] became a standard university textbook for teaching mid- and late-19th century U.S. history.^[49] Wilson had a considerable reputation as a historian and was an early member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.^[50] He was also an elected member of the American Philosophical Society in 1897.^[51]

President of Princeton University

In June 1902, Princeton trustees promoted Professor Wilson to president, replacing Patton, whom the trustees perceived to be an inefficient administrator.^[52] Wilson aspired, as he told alumni, "to transform thoughtless boys performing tasks into thinking men." He tried to raise admission standards 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 guidance of teaching assistants known as preceptors.^{[53][page needed]} To fund these new programs, Wilson undertook an ambitious and successful fundraising campaign, convincing alumni such as Moses Taylor Pyne and philanthropists such as Andrew Carnegie to donate to the school.^[54] Wilson appointed the first Jew and the first Roman Catholic to the faculty, and helped liberate the board from domination by conservative Presbyterians.^[55] He also worked to keep African Americans out of the school, even as other Ivy League schools were accepting small numbers of black people.^[56][a]

Philosophy professor John Grier Hibben had known Wilson since they were undergraduates together. They became close friends. Indeed, when Wilson became president of Princeton in 1902 Hibben was his chief advisor. In 1912 Hibben stunned Wilson by taking the lead against Wilson's pet reform plan. They were permanently estranged, and Wilson was decisively defeated. In 1912, two years after Wilson left Princeton, Hibben became president of Princeton.^[58][59]

Wilson's efforts to reform Princeton earned him national fame, but they also took a toll on his health.^[60] In 1906, Wilson awoke to find himself blind in the left eye, the result of a blood clot and hypertension. Modern medical opinion 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.^[61]

In 1906, while vacationing in Bermuda, Wilson met Mary Hulbert Peck, a socialite. According to biographer August Heckscher II, Wilson's friendship with Peck became the topic of frank discussion between Wilson and his wife, although Wilson historians have not conclusively established there was an affair.^[62] Wilson also sent very personal letters to her,^[63] which were later used against him by his adversaries.^[64]

Having reorganized Princeton University'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.^[65] He proposed moving the students into colleges, also known as quadrangles, but Wilson's plan was met with fierce opposition from Princeton alumni.^[66] In October 1907, due to the intensity of alumni opposition, Princeton's board of trustees instructed Wilson to withdraw his plan for relocating student dormitories.^[67] Late in his tenure, Wilson had a confrontation with Andrew Fleming West, dean of Princeton University's graduate school and his ally, ex-President Grover Cleveland, who was a Princeton trustee. Wilson wanted to integrate a proposed graduate school building into the core of the campus, but 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.^[68]

Wilson became disenchanted with his job as Princeton University president due to the resistance to his recommendations, and he began considering a run for political 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 it, Wilson left instructions that he should not be offered the vice presidential nomination. Party regulars considered his ideas politically and geographically detached and fanciful, but the seeds of interest had been sown.^[69] In 1956, McGeorge Bundy described Wilson's contribution to Princeton: "Wilson was right in his conviction that Princeton must be more than a wonderfully pleasant and decent home for nice young men; it has been more ever since his time."^[70]

Governor of New Jersey (1911–1913)

By January 1910, Wilson had drawn the attention of James Smith Jr. and George Brinton McClellan Harvey, two leaders of New Jersey's Democratic Party, as a potential candidate in the upcoming gubernatorial election.^[71] Having lost the last five gubernatorial elections, New Jersey Democratic leaders decided to throw their support behind Wilson, an untested and unconventional candidate. Party leaders believed that Wilson's academic reputation made him the ideal spokesman against trusts and corruption, but they also hoped his inexperience in governing would make him easy to influence.^[72] Wilson agreed to accept the nomination if "it came to me unsought, unanimously, and without pledges to anybody about anything."^[73]

At the state party convention, the bosses marshaled their forces and won the nomination for Wilson. On October 20, Wilson submitted his letter of resignation to Princeton University.^[74] Wilson's campaign focused on his promise to be independent of party bosses. He quickly shed his professorial style for more emboldened speechmaking and presented himself as a full-fledged progressive.^[75] Though Republican William Howard Taft had carried New Jersey in the 1908 presidential election by more than 82,000 votes, Wilson soundly defeated Republican gubernatorial nominee Vivian M. Lewis by a margin of more than 65,000 votes.^[76] Democrats also took control of the general assembly in the 1910 elections, though the state senate remained in Republican hands.^[77] After winning the election, Wilson appointed Joseph Patrick Tumulty as his private secretary, a position he held throughout Wilson's political career.^[77]

Wilson began formulating his reformist agenda, intending to ignore the demands of his party machinery. Smith asked Wilson to endorse his bid for the U.S. Senate, but Wilson refused and instead endorsed Smith's opponent James Edgar Martine, who had won the Democratic primary. Martine's victory in the Senate election helped Wilson position himself as an independent force in the New Jersey Democratic Party.^[78] By the time Wilson took office, New Jersey had gained a reputation for public corruption; the state was known as the "Mother of Trusts" because it allowed companies like Standard Oil to escape the antitrust laws of other states.^[79] Wilson and his allies quickly won passage of the Geran bill, which undercut the power of the political bosses by requiring primaries for all elective offices and party officials. A corrupt practices law and a workmen's compensation statute that Wilson supported won passage shortly thereafter.^[80] For his success in passing these laws during the first months of his gubernatorial term, Wilson won national and bipartisan recognition as a reformer and a leader of the Progressive movement.^[81]

Republicans took control of the state assembly in early 1912, and Wilson spent much of the rest of his tenure vetoing bills.^[82] He nonetheless won passage of laws that restricted labor by women and children and increased standards for factory working conditions.^[83] A new State Board of Education was set up "with the power to conduct inspections and enforce standards, regulate districts' borrowing authority, and require special classes for students with handicaps."^[84] Before leaving office Wilson oversaw the establishment of free dental clinics and enacted a "comprehensive and scientific" poor law. Trained nursing was standardized, while contract labor in all reformatories and prisons was abolished and an indeterminate sentence act passed.^[85] A law was introduced that compelled all railroad companies "to pay their employees twice monthly," while regulation of the working hours, health, safety, employment, and age of people employed in mercantile establishments was carried out.^[86] Shortly before leaving office, 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.^[87]

Presidential election of 1912

Democratic nomination

Wilson became a prominent 1912 presidential contender immediately upon his election as Governor of New Jersey in 1910, and his clashes with state party bosses enhanced his reputation with the rising Progressive movement.^[88] In addition to progressives, Wilson enjoyed the support of Princeton alumni such as Cyrus McCormick and Southerners such as Walter Hines Page, who believed that Wilson's status as a transplanted Southerner gave him broad appeal.^[89] Though Wilson's shift to the left won the admiration of many, it also created enemies such as George Brinton McClellan Harvey, a former Wilson supporter who had close ties to Wall Street.^[90] In July 1911, Wilson brought William Gibbs McAdoo and "Colonel" Edward M. House in to manage the campaign.^[91] Prior to the 1912 Democratic National Convention, Wilson made a special effort to win the approval of three-time Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan, whose followers had largely dominated the Democratic Party since the 1896 presidential election.^[92]

Speaker of the House Champ Clark of Missouri was viewed by many as the front-runner for the nomination, while House Majority Leader Oscar Underwood of Alabama also loomed as a challenger. Clark found support among the Bryan wing of the party, while Underwood appealed to the conservative Bourbon Democrats, especially in the South.^[93] In the 1912 Democratic Party presidential primaries, Clark won several of the early contests, but Wilson finished strong with victories in Texas, the Northeast, and the Midwest.^[94] On the first presidential ballot of the Democratic convention, Clark won a plurality of delegates; his support continued to grow after the New York Tammany Hall machine swung behind him on the tenth ballot.^[95] Tammany's support backfired for Clark, as Bryan announced that he would not support any candidate that had Tammany's backing, and Clark began losing delegates on subsequent ballots.^[96] Wilson gained the support of Roger Charles Sullivan and Thomas Taggart by promising the vice presidency to Governor Thomas R. Marshall of Indiana.^[97] and several Southern delegations shifted their support from Underwood to Wilson. Wilson finally won two-thirds of the vote on the convention's 46th ballot, and Marshall became Wilson's running mate.^[98]

Zdroj:https://en.wikipedia.org?pojem=Electoral_History_of_Woodrow_Wilson
Text je dostupný za podmienok Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0 Unported; prípadne za ďalších podmienok. Podrobnejšie informácie nájdete na stránke Podmienky použitia.

---