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WOODROW WILSON | ARTICLE

A Portrait of Wilson
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 Wilson as President of Princeton University. 1902. PD.

The Wilson family bible records Thomas Woodrow Wilson's birth in Staunton,
Virginia, "on the 28th December, 1856 at 12 3/4 o'clock at night." Growing up
amid the tumult of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Tommy (as he was called)
was immersed in the terror and despair of the South in those years. On May 14,
1865, an 8-year-old Wilson watched as captured Confederate president
Jefferson Davis was led through town in chains. Though for many, life in the
South would never be the same, Wilson, his two older sisters, and a younger
brother experienced a comfortable childhood, enjoying the affection of a warm,
attentive mother and the instruction of a gregarious yet demanding
Presbyterian minister father. "Wilson's father would give him an idea that the
true test was making the world a place where justice, where goodness had a
better and bigger place than it had before he came on the scene," says Jay
Winter, Historian
Wilson was a poor student early in life, still unable to read at age ten. Though
teachers thought him slow, Wilson's parents provided him with plenty of
support. Historians now believe young Wilson was afflicted by a form of
dyslexia. To help his son overcome these difficulties, Wilson's father spent hours
coaching him in the art of debate. From these early years forward, the
Presbyterian faith his father preached would be Wilson's guiding belief.
Enrolling first at Davidson College in North Carolina and then at the College of
New Jersey in Princeton, Woodrow ( his mother's maiden name, and his newly
adopted given name) excelled at oratory and debate, which led him to the study
of law at the University of Virginia as a means to public office. Wilson's practice
of law quickly stalled; mundane case work could not compete with his sweeping
ambitions in politics and government.

While on a rare business trip from his law office in Atlanta to nearby Rome,
Georgia, Wilson fell in love with an extremely intelligent young woman he saw
in church, a burgeoning artist named Ellen Axson. They were married in 1885
and brought the first of their three daughters into the world the following year.
Ellen and Woodrow agreed that to further his political ambitions, he should
become a professor. He started graduate study at Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore, where he virtually created his own curriculum emphasizing literary-
style commentary instead of specialized, primary research.

Wilson's first book, Congressional Government, criticized the American model of

government in favor of the British parliamentary system. The book's success
landed Wilson teaching posts at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, and
Wesleyan College in Connecticut. An academic rising star, Wilson returned to
Princeton in 1890 to become a professor of jurisprudence and economics at his
beloved alma mater. The most popular professor on campus, Wilson lectured on
the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots in America in the early
1890s. Captains of industry like the Rockefellers, Carnegies and Morgans had
become fabulously wealthy, while the majority of American workers lived in
poverty. Wilson proposed the federal government be given more power to rein
in big business. Publishing his views in magazines like Harper's and accepting
numerous speaking invitations, Wilson soon became a nationally-known public
figure. In 1902, Wilson was unanimously elected president of Princeton
University. 

As president of Princeton, Wilson sought to build the university into the nation's
foremost center of scholarship. He proposed sweeping educational and social
reforms, including the creation of a world-class graduate school in the center of
campus. To make the university attractive to serious scholars, Wilson planned to
abolish Princeton's fraternity-like eating clubs, filled with some of the school's
richest and laziest students. While Wilson's proposals were initially well
received, they soon became the objects of strong resistance from conservative
trustees and rich alumni. As a result of the highly publicized battle, Wilson
gained a national reputation for not only advocating educational reform, but for
fighting social inequity. Soon, Wilson's name was mentioned as a leading
candidate for public office. The New Jersey Democratic Party political bosses,
who mistakenly thought the college president would play the part of political
stooge, convinced Wilson that their support would guarantee his election as the
state's governor. Once in office, Wilson successfully pushed a decidedly
progressive agenda, and along the way outwitted the very bosses who thought
Wilson a puppet for their use. His New Jersey successes positioned Wilson at
the forefront of the cresting, national wave of progressivism. Wilson became the
Democratic Party candidate fo the 1912 presidential election and won the tight
race, helped in large part by the Republican Party's split between William
Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt.

During his first two years as president, Wilson demonstrated his political
acumen in accomplishing one of the most impressive strings of domestic
legislative victories in history. In the summer of 1914, as the world's first world
war erupted in Europe, Wilson watched helplessly as his wife of thirty years
died of a kidney disease. Losing Ellen threw Wilson into despair, but with the
world at war, clear thinking had never been more important. Wilson maintained
a precarious neutrality for nearly three years, promising to keep the country out
of war as he ran for a second term in 1916, but then found no option but to lead
the nation into battle.

Wilson hoped participation in the war would enable him to broker a peace
treaty that might end war forever. Central to the treaty would be the creation of
a forum for non-violent resolution of international hostilities — a league of
Nations. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, he painstakingly won key
points of the treaty from British prime minister David Lloyd George and French
premier Georges Clemenceau, who vengefully favored heavy restitution from
Germany. But back home Wilson's dreams were thwarted by Senator Henry
Cabot Lodge and other powerful political enemies who blocked the treaty's
ratification.

The stress of a last-ditch, cross-country campaign to rally popular support for

the treaty, coupled with recurring health problems, resulted in Wilson's suffering
a physical breakdown and then a paralytic stroke. Rendered incapable of
executing his duties, the president was sequestered from nearly all visitors by
his personal physician and by his second wife, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, whom
he had married in 1916.

The country was effectively without a chief executive for the last months of
Wilson's term in office. In 1919, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Woodrow Wilson left the White House in March 1921, and he lived the next
three years as a partial invalid in his Washington, D.C. home. He died on
February 3, 1924, and was interred at the National Cathedral.
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