Who did President Wilson appoint as secretary of state to implement his foreign policy?
|
Woodrow Wilson, a leader of the Progressive Movement, was the 28th President of the United States (1913-1921). After a policy of neutrality at the outbreak of World War I, Wilson led America into war in order to “make the world safe for democracy.” Show Like Roosevelt before him, Woodrow Wilson regarded himself as the personal representative of the people. “No one but the President,” he said, “seems to be expected … to look out for the general interests of the country.” He developed a program of progressive reform and asserted international leadership in building a new world order. In 1917 he proclaimed American entrance into World War I a crusade to make the world “safe for democracy.” Wilson had seen the frightfulness of war. He was born in Virginia in 1856, the son of a Presbyterian minister who during the Civil War was a pastor in Augusta, Georgia, and during Reconstruction a professor in the charred city of Columbia, South Carolina. After graduation from Princeton (then the College of New Jersey) and the University of Virginia Law School, Wilson earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University and entered upon an academic career. In 1885 he married Ellen Louise Axson. Wilson advanced rapidly as a conservative young professor of political science and became president of Princeton in 1902. His growing national reputation led some conservative Democrats to consider him Presidential timber. First they persuaded him to run for Governor of New Jersey in 1910. In the campaign he asserted his independence of the conservatives and of the machine that had nominated him, endorsing a progressive platform, which he pursued as governor. He was nominated for President at the 1912 Democratic Convention and campaigned on a program called the New Freedom, which stressed individualism and states’ rights. In the three-way election he received only 42 percent of the popular vote but an overwhelming electoral vote. Wilson maneuvered through Congress three major pieces of legislation. The first was a lower tariff, the Underwood Act; attached to the measure was a graduated Federal income tax. The passage of the Federal Reserve Act provided the Nation with the more elastic money supply it badly needed. In 1914 antitrust legislation established a Federal Trade Commission to prohibit unfair business practices. Another burst of legislation followed in 1916. One new law prohibited child labor; another limited railroad workers to an eight-hour day. By virtue of this legislation and the slogan “he kept us out of war,” Wilson narrowly won re-election. But after the election Wilson concluded that America could not remain neutral in the World War. On April 2,1917, he asked Congress for a declaration of war on Germany. Massive American effort slowly tipped the balance in favor of the Allies. Wilson went before Congress in January 1918, to enunciate American war aims–the Fourteen Points, the last of which would establish “A general association of nations…affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.” After the Germans signed the Armistice in November 1918, Wilson went to Paris to try to build an enduring peace. He later presented to the Senate the Versailles Treaty, containing the Covenant of the League of Nations, and asked, “Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?” But the election of 1918 had shifted the balance in Congress to the Republicans. By seven votes the Versailles Treaty failed in the Senate. The President, against the warnings of his doctors, had made a national tour to mobilize public sentiment for the treaty. Exhausted, he suffered a stroke and nearly died. Tenderly nursed by his second wife, Edith Bolling Galt, he lived until 1924. The Presidential biographies on WhiteHouse.gov are from “The Presidents of the United States of America,” by Frank Freidel and Hugh Sidey. Copyright 2006 by the White House Historical Association. Learn more about President Wilson’s first wife, Ellen Axson Wilson, who died during her term. Learn more about President Wilson’s second wife, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson. Top Questions When was Woodrow Wilson president?What were Woodrow Wilson’s accomplishments?Why was Woodrow Wilson so influential?Summary Read a brief summary of this topicWoodrow Wilson, in full Thomas Woodrow Wilson, (born December 28, 1856, Staunton, Virginia, U.S.—died February 3, 1924, Washington, D.C.), 28th president of the United States (1913–21), 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. During his second term the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, giving women the right to vote, was passed and ratified. He suffered a paralytic stroke while seeking American public support for the Treaty of Versailles (October 1919), and his incapacity, which lasted for the rest of his term of office, caused the worst crisis of presidential disability in American history. Early life, education, and governorshipWilson’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 “Tommy” 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. Apparently dyslexic from childhood, 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. He attended Davidson College near Charlotte, North Carolina, for a year before entering what is now Princeton University in 1875. 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. Britannica Quiz World War I: Fact or Fiction? Did Canada fight on the side of Britain in World War I? Was Italy an ally of Germany in World War I? From the Flying Tigers to the Red Baron, experience the Great War in this quiz. After graduation from Princeton in 1879, Wilson studied law at the University of Virginia, with the hope that law would lead to politics. 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 Ph.D.; 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. Among his later works are a general analysis of government, The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics (1889); a history of the United States, Division and Reunion, 1829–1889 (1893); the five-volume A History of the American People (1902); and Constitutional Government in the United States (1908), in which Wilson elegantly set forth the modern view of the president as “the representative of no constituency, but of the whole people. When he speaks in his true character, he speaks for no special interest.” Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now In 1885 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 Allen 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. 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. What did Wilson do for foreign policy?Wilson took direct personal control of American foreign policy, which he believed was constitutionally mandated. He personally attended meetings and negotiations and penned his approval of the Terms of Peace and the Covenant of the League of Nations.
What agencies did Woodrow Wilson create?On December 23, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law. The act created a Federal Reserve System, comprised of a Federal Reserve Board, twelve regional reserve banks, and the underpinnings of a smooth central banking system.
|
