Woodrow Wilson Born: Idealist President, Flawed Legacy

Woodrow Wilson was born on December 28, 1856, in Staunton, Virginia, the son of a Presbyterian minister who served as a chaplain in the Confederate Army. He grew up in the postwar South, a landscape of defeat and reconstruction that shaped his understanding of national division and reunification. He did not learn to read until he was ten, possibly due to dyslexia, but he became a prodigious scholar, earning a PhD from Johns Hopkins and eventually serving as president of Princeton University, where he reformed the curriculum and fought the eating clubs that enforced class hierarchy among students. He was elected governor of New Jersey in 1910 and president of the United States in 1912, winning a three-way race against Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. His presidency produced the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Trade Commission, and the first permanent income tax under the Sixteenth Amendment. He guided the country through World War I, initially pursuing neutrality before Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram forced American entry in 1917. He arrived at the Versailles peace conference in 1919 convinced he could build a new world order on his Fourteen Points, which promised national self-determination, free trade, and a League of Nations to prevent future wars. The French and British carved up the spoils of empire while Wilson fought for the League. The Senate refused to ratify it. He suffered a massive stroke in October 1919 while touring the country to drum up public support and never fully recovered. His wife Edith managed the presidency informally for the remainder of his term, shielding his condition from the public and the Cabinet.