Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson took the United States into the First World War, wrote the terms he wanted the peace to follow, and failed to get his own country to join the League he had designed. Born in Virginia in 1856, the son of a Presbyterian minister who supported the Confederacy, he saw Union troops as a child and did not read fluently until he was ten, which may indicate dyslexia. He took a doctorate in political science — still the only president with one — and wrote on the failures of congressional government, taught, and became president of Princeton, where he reformed the undergraduate teaching and lost a political fight over the graduate school. He was governor of New Jersey for two years and president in 1913 because the Republicans split. His first term was one of the most productive on record: the Federal Reserve, the income tax, the Federal Trade Commission, the Clayton Antitrust Act, the eight-hour railway day. It also imposed segregation across the federal civil service, which had been integrated since Reconstruction, demoting or dismissing Black employees and screening a film that celebrated the Klan at the White House. He was re-elected in 1916 on having kept the country out of war and asked Congress for war five months later, after unrestricted submarine warfare resumed. The Fourteen Points of January 1918 — open covenants, freedom of the seas, self-determination, a league of nations — set the terms on which Germany asked for an armistice, and Paris delivered a fraction of them. He toured the country to sell the treaty, collapsed in Colorado in September 1919 and had a severe stroke days later; his wife screened his papers for the rest of the term. The Senate rejected the treaty twice. He died in 1924.
- Lived: 1856 CE – 1924 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: president, statesman, idealist
