Woodrow Wilson
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Revision as of 20:58, 15 April 2011
Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856 – February 3, 1924) was the 28th President of the United States from 1913 to 1920. A leader of the Progressive Movement, 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. He is the only U.S. President to hold a Ph.D. degree, which he obtained from Johns Hopkins University.
In his first term, Wilson persuaded a Democratic Congress to pass the Federal Reserve Act, Federal Trade Commission Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, the Federal Farm Loan Act and America's first-ever federal progressive income tax in the Revenue Act of 1913. Wilson brought many white Southerners into his administration, and tolerated their expansion of segregation in many federal agencies.
Narrowly re-elected in 1916, Wilson's second term centered on the Weltkrieg. He based his re-election campaign around the slogan "he kept us out of war", a policy which was strongly criticized by the Republicans. In 1919, during the bitter fight with the Republican-controlled Senate over the U.S. joining the war, Wilson collapsed with a debilitating stroke. He refused to compromise, and so kept America out of the war, while he was defeated by Leonard Wood in the 1920 election by then it was widely seen as too late for the Entente to win.
