Emperor List of Authors
Thomas Woodrow WilsonVladimir Ilich LeninSun ZhongshanFriedrich Ebert
Taisho EmperorLi YuanhongZhang ZuolinÉmile François Loubet
Tan YankaiWilliam Howard TaftClement Armand FallièresPaul Doumer
Hu WeideCen ChunxuanJohn Calvin Coolidge,Jr.Raymond Poincaré
Paul von HindenburgHuang FuDuan QiruiHu Hanmin
George VGaston DoumergueSir Robert Laird BordenCao Kun
Ryikov,Leksei IvanovichXu ShichangGao LingweiWilhelm II
Lin SenAlexandre MillerandWang JingweiFranklin Delano Roosevelt
Franklin Delano RooseveltAdolf HitlerRichard Bedford BennettYan Huiqing
Albert LebrunLéon BlumWilliam Lyon Mackenzie KingWilliam Lyon Mackenzie King
William Lyon Mackenzie KingHenri Philippe PétainKing George VIJoseph Stalin
Arthur MeighenArthur MeighenWilhelm PieckRené Coty
John Fitzgerald KennedyHerbert Clark HooverJules-Vincent AuriolXuan Tong
Xuan TongKonrad AdenauerLi ZongrenDwight David Eisenhower
Charles de GaulleCharles de GaulleCharles de GaulleNikita Khrushchev
Thomas Woodrow Wilson
Emperor  (December 28, 1856 ADFebruary 3, 1924 AD)
StartEnd
Reign1913 AD1921 AD

  Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856–February 3, 1924) was the 28th President of the United States. A leading intellectual of the Progressive Era, he served as President of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910, and then as the Governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913. With Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft dividing the Republican Party vote, Wilson was elected President as a Democrat in 1912. To date he is the only President to hold a doctorate of philosophy (Ph.D.) degree and the only President to serve in a political office in New Jersey before election to the Presidency.
  
  In his first term, Wilson supported a Democratic Congress to pass the Federal Reserve Act, Federal Trade Commission, the Clayton Antitrust Act, the Federal Farm Loan Act and America's first-ever federal progressive income tax in the Revenue Act of 1913. In a move that garnered a backlash from civil rights groups, and is still criticized today, Wilson supported imposing segregation in many federally funded agencies, which involved firing black workers from numerous posts.
  
  Narrowly re-elected in 1916, Wilson's second term centered on World War I. He based his re-election campaign around the slogan "he kept us out of the war," but U.S. neutrality would be short-lived. When German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann sent a message to Mexico offering to return Arizona, New Mexico and Texas to them if they would ally with Germany in the event of war, and began unrestricted submarine warfare, Wilson wrote several admonishing notes to Germany, and, finally in April 1917, asked Congress to declare war. He focused on diplomacy and financial considerations, leaving the waging of the war primarily in the hands of the military establishment. On the home front, he began the United States' first effective draft in 1917, raised billions in war funding through Liberty Bonds, set up the War Industries Board, promoted labor union growth, supervised agriculture and food production through the Lever Act, took over control of the railroads, enacted the first federal drug prohibition, and suppressed anti-war movements. National women's suffrage was also achieved under Wilson's presidency.
  
  In the late stages of the war, Wilson took personal control of negotiations with Germany, including the armistice. He issued his Fourteen Points, his view of a post-war world that could avoid another terrible conflict. He went to Paris in 1919 to create the League of Nations and shape the Treaty of Versailles, with special attention on creating new nations out of defunct empires. Largely for his efforts to form the League, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1919, during the bitter fight with the Republican-controlled Senate over the U.S. joining the League of Nations, Wilson collapsed with a debilitating stroke. He refused to compromise, effectively destroying any chance for ratification. The League of Nations was established anyway, but the United States never joined. Wilson's idealistic internationalism, now referred to as "Wilsonianism", which calls for the United States to enter the world arena to fight for democracy, has been a contentious position in American foreign policy, serving as a model for "idealists" to emulate and "realists" to reject ever since.
    

Comments (0)