Page 9 - Presidential Profiles

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PRESIDENTIALPROFILES | WILSON
WOODROW WILSON 28th President, First Southerner Elected Since the Civil War
Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in Virginia and grew up in Georgia and South Carolina. After serving as president of Princeton University and the governor of New Jersey, he became the first Southerner elected president since the end of the Civil War.
EARLY LIFE
Born in 1856 Virginia, Wilson grew up in a home with slaves. His father, Joseph Ruggles WIlson, was a Presbyterian pastor who moved the family to Augusta, Georgia, and Columbia South Carolina. Woodrow Wilson graduated from Princeton University and briefly attended the University of Virginia School of Law before pursuing political science and history at Johns Hopkins.
Wilson married Ellen Louise Axson, and had three children, Margaret, Jessie and Eleanor. Axson would die while he was in office in 1914, and Wilson remarried Edith Bolling Galt in 1915.
GOVERNOR OF NEW JERSEY
New Jersey’s Democratic Party turned to Wilson after five consecutive defeats in the gubernatorial race. He resigned from Princeton after earning the Democratic nomination and won election to the seat in 1910. Wilson put together a reformist agenda, largely ignoring party politics, and won pas- sage of laws restricting labor by women and children and a series of antitrust laws.
PRESIDENCY
Wilson won the 1912 presidential
WOODROW WILSON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY ARCHIVES
election, defeating William Howard Taft, former President Theodore Roosevelt, and Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs. He introduced a com- prehensive New Freedom domestic agenda at the outset of his presidency, focusing on natural resources, bank reform, tariff reduction and access to raw materials.
Foreign affairs, however, would largely dominate his presidency as the U.S. intervened in Latin America and World War I broke out in 1914. The
U.S. entered the war in 1917 after the sinking of the Lusitania, a series of attacks on American ships, and the interception of the Zimmerman Telegram in which Germany tried to convince Mexico to go to war with the U.S.
After World War I, Wilson sought to establish the League of Nations to pre- vent a world war from breaking out again. In establishing the organiza- tion, nations signed a covenant to respect freedom of religion, treat racial minorities fairly and peacefully settle disputes.
At home, flu and an economic recession were compounded by work- ers strikes and a rash of anarchist bombings. Prohibition also passed during this time, as did women’s suf- frage with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Wilson’s health was failing, however, and though his policies were the center of the 1920 election, Wilson didn’t run again.
POST-PRESIDENCY
Wilson and his wife stayed in Washington, D.C., where he followed politics and opened a law office with former Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby. He died in 1924 and was interred in the Washington National Cathedral.