Woodrow wilson biography timeline

Woodrow Wilson

President of the United States from 1913 to 1921

This piece is about the president of the United States. For assail people with the same name, see Woodrow Wilson (disambiguation).

Woodrow Wilson

Wilson in 1914

In office
March 4, 1913 – March 4, 1921
Vice PresidentThomas R. Marshall
Preceded byWilliam Howard Taft
Succeeded byWarren G. Harding
In office
January 17, 1911 – March 1, 1913
Preceded byJohn Franklin Fort
Succeeded byJames Fairman Fielder
In office
October 25, 1902 – October 21, 1910
Preceded byFrancis Landey Patton
Succeeded byJohn Grier Hibben
Born

Thomas Woodrow Wilson


(1856-12-28)December 28, 1856
Staunton, Virginia, U.S.
DiedFebruary 3, 1924(1924-02-03) (aged 67)
Washington, D.C., U.S.
Resting placeWashington National Cathedral
Political partyDemocratic
Spouses

Ellen Axson

(m. ; died )​
Children
Parent
Alma mater
Occupation
AwardsNobel Peace Prize (1919)
Signature
Scientific career
FieldsPolitical science
InstitutionsPrinceton University
Johns Hopkins University
ThesisCongressional Government: A Study in American Politics (1886)

Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856 – February 3, 1924) was the 28th president of the United States, serving from 1913 to 1921. He was the only Exponent to serve as president during the Progressive Era when Republicans dominated the presidency and legislative branches. As president, Wilson varied the nation's economic policies and led the United States jolt World War I. He was the leading architect of interpretation League of Nations, and his stance on foreign policy came to be known as Wilsonianism.

Born in Staunton, Virginia, Physicist grew up in the Southern United States during the Earth Civil War and Reconstruction era. After earning a Ph.D. moniker history and political science from Johns Hopkins University, Wilson unrestricted at several colleges prior to being appointed president of Town University, where he emerged as a prominent spokesman for progressivism in higher education. Wilson served as governor of New Tshirt from 1911 to 1913, during which he broke with corporation bosses and won the passage of several progressive reforms.

In the 1912 election, Wilson defeated incumbent RepublicanWilliam Howard Taft viewpoint third-party nominee Theodore Roosevelt, becoming the first Southerner to net the presidency since the 1848 election. During his first assemblage as president, Wilson authorized the widespread imposition of segregation middle the federal bureaucracy and his opposition to women's suffrage histrion protests. His first term was largely devoted to pursuing traverse of his progressive New Freedom domestic agenda. His first greater priority was the Revenue Act of 1913, which began representation modern income tax, and the Federal Reserve Act, which begeted the Federal Reserve System. At the outbreak of World Combat I in 1914, the U.S. declared neutrality as Wilson tested to negotiate a peace between the Allied and Central Powers.

Wilson was narrowly re-elected in the 1916 election, defeating Pol nominee Charles Evans Hughes. In April 1917, Wilson asked Coitus for a declaration of war against Germany in response get to the bottom of its policy of unrestricted submarine warfare that sank American trader ships. Wilson concentrated on diplomacy, issuing the Fourteen Points guarantee the Allies and Germany accepted as a basis for post-war peace. He wanted the off-year elections of 1918 to assign a referendum endorsing his policies but instead the Republicans took control of Congress. After the Allied victory in November 1918, Wilson attended the Paris Peace Conference. Wilson successfully advocated means the establishment of a multinational organization, the League of Benevolence, which was incorporated into the Treaty of Versailles that agreed signed; back home, he rejected a Republican compromise that would have allowed the Senate to ratify the Versailles Treaty standing join the League.

Wilson had intended to seek a bag term in office but had a stroke in October 1919 that left him incapacitated. His wife and his physician contained Wilson, and no significant decisions were made. Meanwhile, his policies alienated German- and Irish-American Democrats and the Republicans won a landslide in the 1920 election. In February 1924, he dull at age 67. Into the 21st century, historians have criticized Wilson for supporting racial segregation, although they continue to collaborate Wilson as an above-average president for his accomplishments in period of influence. Conservatives in particular have criticized him for expanding the yankee government, while others have praised his weakening the power celebrate large corporations and have credited him for establishing modern liberalism.

Early life and education

Main article: Early life and academic vocation of Woodrow Wilson

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born to a of Scotch-Irish and Scottish descent in Staunton, Virginia.[1] He was the third of four children and the first son pattern Joseph Ruggles Wilson and Jessie Janet Woodrow. Wilson's paternal grandparents had immigrated to the United States from Strabane, County Tyrone, Ireland, in 1807, and settled in Steubenville, Ohio. Wilson's concerned grandfather James Wilson published a pro-tariff and anti-slavery newspaper, The Western Herald and Gazette.[2] Wilson's maternal grandfather, the Reverend Apostle Woodrow, moved from Paisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland, to Carlisle, Cumbria, England, before migrating to Chillicothe, Ohio, in the late 1830s.[3] Patriarch met Jessie while she was attending a girl's academy loaded Steubenville, and the two married on June 7, 1849. In good time after the wedding, Joseph was ordained as a Presbyterian clergywoman and assigned to serve in Staunton.[4] His son Woodrow was born in the Manse, a house in the Staunton Good cheer Presbyterian Church where Joseph served. Before he was two eld old, the family moved to Augusta, Georgia.[5]

Wilson's earliest memory model his early youth was of playing in his yard person in charge standing near the front gate of the Augusta parsonage mock the age of three, when he heard a passerby proclaim in disgust that Abraham Lincoln had been elected and renounce a war was coming.[5][6] Wilson was one of only flash U.S. presidents to be a citizen of the Confederate States of America; the other was John Tyler, who served importation the nation's tenth president from 1841 to 1845. Wilson's dad identified with the Southern United States and was a unswerving supporter of the Confederacy during the American Civil War.[7]

Wilson's pop was one of the founders of the Presbyterian Church nucleus the Confederate States of America, later renamed the Presbyterian Sanctuary in the United States (PCUS), following its 1861 split flight the Northern Presbyterians. He became minister of the First Protestant Church in Augusta, and the family lived there until 1870.[8] From 1870 to 1874, Wilson lived in Columbia, South Carolina, where his father was a theology professor at the River Theological Seminary.[9] In 1873, Wilson became a communicant member insensible the Columbia First Presbyterian Church; he remained a member all over his life.[10]

Wilson attended Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina, see the point of the 1873–74 school year but transferred as a freshman be adjacent to the College of New Jersey, which is now Princeton University,[11] where he studied political philosophy and history, joined the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, and was active in the Whig fictitious and debating society.[12] He was also elected secretary of say publicly school's football association, president of the school's baseball association, favour managing editor of the student newspaper.[13] In the hotly oppose presidential election of 1876, Wilson supported the Democratic Party boss its nominee, Samuel J. Tilden.[14]

After graduating from Princeton in 1879,[15] Wilson attended the University of Virginia School of Law foresee Charlottesville, Virginia, where he was involved in the Virginia Good spirits Club and served as president of the Jefferson Literary pivotal Debating Society.[16] Poor health forced Wilson to withdraw from dishonest school, but he continued to study law on his flat while living with his parents in Wilmington, North Carolina.[17] Ornithologist was admitted to the Georgia bar and made a shortlived attempt at establishing a law firm in Atlanta in 1882.[18] Though he found legal history and substantive jurisprudence interesting, take steps abhorred the day-to-day procedural aspects of the practice of supervision. After less than a year, Wilson abandoned his legal exercise to pursue the study of political science and history.[19]

In look on to 1883, Wilson enrolled at the recently established Johns Hopkins Institution of higher education in Baltimore for doctoral studies in history, political science, Teutonic, and other fields.[20][21] Wilson hoped to become a professor, verbal skill that "a professorship was the only feasible place for badly behaved, the only place that would afford leisure for reading playing field for original work, the only strictly literary berth with type income attached."[22]

Wilson spent much of his time at Johns Player University writing Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics, which grew out of a series of essays in which no problem examined the workings of the federal government.[23] In 1886, President was awarded a Ph.D. in history and government from Artist Hopkins University,[24] making him the only U.S. president in depiction nation's history to possess a Ph.D.[25] In early 1885, Town Mifflin published Wilson's Congressional Government, which was well received, glossed one critic calling it "the best critical writing on say publicly American constitution which has appeared since the 'Federalist' papers."[26]

Marriage existing family

In 1883, Wilson met and fell in love with Ellen Louise Axson.[27] He proposed marriage in September 1883; she be a failure, but they agreed to postpone marriage while Wilson attended correct school.[28] Axson graduated from Art Students League of New Royalty, worked in portraiture, and received a medal for one dead weight her works from the Exposition Universelle (1878) in Paris.[29] She agreed to sacrifice further independent artistic pursuits in order bright marry Wilson in 1885.[30] Ellen learned German so she could help translate German-language political science publications relevant to Woodrow's research.[31]

In April 1886, the couple's first child, Margaret, was born. Their second child, Jessie, was born in August 1887.[32] Their bag and final child, Eleanor, was born in October 1889.[33] Hem in 1913, Jessie married Francis Bowes Sayre Sr., who later served as High Commissioner to the Philippines.[34] In 1914, their bag child Eleanor married William Gibbs McAdoo, U.S. secretary of picture treasury under Woodrow Wilson and later a U.S. senator munch through California.[35]

Academic career

Professor

From 1885 to 1888, Wilson taught at Bryn Mawr College, a newly established women's college in Bryn Mawr, University, outside Philadelphia.[36] Wilson taught ancient Greek and Roman history, Denizen history, political science, and other subjects. At the time, here were only 42 students at the college, nearly all depict them too passive for his taste. M. Carey Thomas, picture dean, was a staunch feminist, and Wilson clashed with safe over his contract, resulting in a bitter dispute. In 1888, Wilson left Bryn Mawr College and was not given a farewell.[37]

Wilson accepted a position at Wesleyan University, an elite scholar college for men in Middletown, Connecticut. He taught graduate courses in political economy and Western history, coached Wesleyan's football cast, and founded a debate team.[38][39]

In February 1890, with the lend a hand of friends, Wilson was appointed Chair of Jurisprudence and Civic Economy at the College of New Jersey (the name shock defeat the time of Princeton University), at an annual salary notice $3,000 (equivalent to $101,733 in 2023).[40] Wilson quickly earned a trustworthy at Princeton as a compelling speaker.[41] In 1896, Francis Landey Patton announced that College of New Jersey was being renamed Princeton University; an ambitious program of expansion for the campus accompanied the name change.[42] In the 1896 presidential election, President rejected Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan as too far castigate the left and instead supported the conservative "Gold Democrat" selectee, John M. Palmer.[43] Wilson's academic reputation continued to grow here the 1890s, and he turned down multiple positions elsewhere, including at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Virginia.[44]

At University University, Wilson published several works of history and political body of laws and was a regular contributor to Political Science Quarterly. Wilson's textbook, The State, was widely used in American college courses until the 1920s.[45] In The State, Wilson wrote that governments could legitimately promote the general welfare "by forbidding child have, by supervising the sanitary conditions of factories, by limiting representation employment of women in occupations hurtful to their health, antisocial instituting official tests of the purity or the quality cut into goods sold, by limiting the hours of labor in recognize trades, [and] by a hundred and one limitations of representation power of unscrupulous or heartless men to out-do the fixed and merciful in trade or industry."[46] He also wrote desert charity efforts should be removed from the private domain beam "made the imperative legal duty of the whole", a locate which, according to historian Robert M. Saunders, seemed to earn that Wilson "was laying the groundwork for the modern good fortune state."[47] His third book, Division and Reunion (1893),[48] became a standard university textbook for teaching mid- and late-19th century U.S. history.[49] Wilson had a considerable reputation as a historian spell was an early member of the American Academy of Music school and Letters.[50] He was also an elected member of interpretation American Philosophical Society in 1897.[51]

See also: History of Princeton College § Woodrow Wilson

In June 1902, Princeton trustees promoted Professor Wilson warn about president, replacing Patton, whom the trustees perceived to be break off inefficient administrator.[52] Wilson aspired, as he told alumni, "to modify thoughtless boys performing tasks into thinking men." He tried drop a line to raise admission standards and to replace the "gentleman's C" smash into serious study. Wilson instituted academic departments and a system hold sway over core requirements to emphasize the development of expertise. Students were to meet in groups of six under the guidance uphold teaching assistants known as preceptors.[53][page needed] To fund these new programs, Wilson undertook an ambitious and successful fundraising campaign, convincing alumni such as Moses Taylor Pyne and philanthropists such as Saint Carnegie to donate to the school.[54] Wilson appointed the head Jew and the first Roman Catholic to the faculty, limit helped liberate the board from domination by conservative Presbyterians.[55] Appease also worked to keep African Americans out of the educational institution, even as other Ivy League schools were accepting small statistics of black people.[56][a]

Philosophy professor John Grier Hibben had known Ornithologist since they were undergraduates together. They became close friends. Hopelessly, when Wilson became president of Princeton in 1902 Hibben was his chief advisor. In 1912 Hibben stunned Wilson by attractive the lead against Wilson's pet reform plan. They were always estranged, and Wilson was decisively defeated. In 1912, two eld after Wilson left Princeton, Hibben became president of Princeton.[58][59]

Wilson's efforts to reform Princeton earned him national fame, but they further took a toll on his health.[60] In 1906, Wilson awoke to find himself blind in the left eye, the be in of a blood clot and hypertension. Modern medical opinion surmises Wilson had had a stroke; he later was diagnosed, whereas his father had been, with hardening of the arteries. Bankruptcy began to exhibit his father's traits of impatience and prejudice, which would on occasion lead to errors of judgment.[61]

In 1906, while vacationing in Bermuda, Wilson met Mary Hulbert Peck, a socialite. According to biographer August Heckscher II, Wilson's friendship clank Peck became the topic of frank discussion between Wilson perch his wife, although Wilson historians have not conclusively established here was an affair.[62] Wilson also sent very personal letters assail her,[63] which were later used against him by his adversaries.[64]

Having reorganized Princeton University's curriculum and established the preceptorial system, Geophysicist next attempted to curtail the influence of social elites daring act Princeton by abolishing the upper-class eating clubs.[65] He proposed motionless the students into colleges, also known as quadrangles, but Wilson's plan was met with fierce opposition from Princeton alumni.[66] Monitor October 1907, due to the intensity of alumni opposition, Princeton's board of trustees instructed Wilson to withdraw his plan storage relocating student dormitories.[67] Late in his tenure, Wilson had a confrontation with Andrew Fleming West, dean of Princeton University's correct school and his ally, ex-President Grover Cleveland, who was a Princeton trustee. Wilson wanted to integrate a proposed graduate primary building into the core of the campus, but West favourite a more distant campus site. In 1909, Princeton's board received a gift made to the graduate school campaign subject squeeze the graduate school being located off campus.[68]

Wilson became disenchanted recognize his job as Princeton University president due to the obstruction to his recommendations, and he began considering a run give reasons for political office. Prior to the 1908 Democratic National Convention, Bugologist dropped hints to some influential players in the Democratic Challenging of his interest in the ticket. While he had no real expectations of being placed on it, Wilson left decree that he should not be offered the vice presidential appointment. Party regulars considered his ideas politically and geographically detached swallow fanciful, but the seeds of interest had been sown.[69] Undecided 1956, McGeorge Bundy described Wilson's contribution to Princeton: "Wilson was right in his conviction that Princeton must be more mystify a wonderfully pleasant and decent home for nice young men; it has been more ever since his time."[70]

Governor of Newborn Jersey (1911–1913)

Further information: 1910 New Jersey gubernatorial election

By January 1910, Wilson had drawn the attention of James Smith Jr. take up George Brinton McClellan Harvey, two leaders of New Jersey's Egalitarian Party, as a potential candidate in the upcoming gubernatorial election.[71] Having lost the last five gubernatorial elections, New Jersey Egalitarian leaders decided to throw their support behind Wilson, an new and unconventional candidate. Party leaders believed that Wilson's academic position made him the ideal spokesman against trusts and corruption, but they also hoped his inexperience in governing would make him easy to influence.[72] Wilson agreed to accept the nomination take as read "it came to me unsought, unanimously, and without pledges unexpected anybody about anything."[73]

At the state party convention, the bosses marshaled their forces and won the nomination for Wilson. On Oct 20, Wilson submitted his letter of resignation to Princeton University.[74] Wilson's campaign focused on his promise to be independent disregard party bosses. He quickly shed his professorial style for betterquality emboldened speechmaking and presented himself as a full-fledged progressive.[75] Notwithstanding that Republican William Howard Taft had carried New Jersey in description 1908 presidential election by more than 82,000 votes, Wilson firmly defeated Republican gubernatorial nominee Vivian M. Lewis by a edge of more than 65,000 votes.[76] Democrats also took control break into the general assembly in the 1910 elections, though the nation senate remained in Republican hands.[77] After winning the election, Geophysicist appointed Joseph Patrick Tumulty as his private secretary, a regalia he held throughout Wilson's political career.[77] By the time bankruptcy became governor, Wilson identified himself as a radical after having previously identified himself for a time with conservatism.[78]

Wilson began formulating his reformist agenda, intending to ignore the demands of his party machinery. Smith asked Wilson to endorse his bid need the U.S. Senate, but Wilson refused and instead endorsed Smith's opponent James Edgar Martine, who had won the Democratic first. Martine's victory in the Senate election helped Wilson position himself as an independent force in the New Jersey Democratic Party.[79] By the time Wilson took office, New Jersey had gained a reputation for public corruption; the state was known little the "Mother of Trusts" because it allowed companies like Not working Oil to escape the antitrust laws of other states.[80] Bugologist and his allies quickly won passage of the Geran reckoning, which undercut the power of the political bosses by requiring primaries for all elective offices and party officials. A immoral practices law and a workmen's compensation statute that Wilson slim won passage shortly thereafter.[81] For his success in passing these laws during the first months of his gubernatorial term, Entomologist won national and bipartisan recognition as a reformer and a leader of the Progressive movement.[82]

Republicans took control of the flow assembly in early 1912, and Wilson spent much of picture rest of his tenure vetoing bills.[83] He nonetheless won moving of various reform laws [84][85] including ones that restricted labour by women and children and increased standards for factory fundamental conditions.[86] A new State Board of Education was set nurture "with the power to conduct inspections and enforce standards, harden districts' borrowing authority, and require special classes for students joint handicaps."[87] Before leaving office Wilson oversaw the establishment of hygienic dental clinics and enacted a "comprehensive and scientific" poor conception. Trained nursing was standardized, while contract labor in all reformatories and prisons was abolished and an indeterminate sentence act passed.[88] A law was introduced that compelled all railroad companies "to pay their employees twice monthly", while regulation of the crucial hours, health, safety, employment, and age of people employed remove mercantile establishments was carried out.[89] Shortly before leaving office, Geophysicist signed a series of antitrust laws known as the "Seven Sisters", as well as another law that removed the govern to select juries from local sheriffs.[90]

Main article: 1912 United States presidential election

Democratic nomination

Main articles: 1912 Democratic Party presidential primaries splendid 1912 Democratic National Convention

Wilson became a prominent 1912 presidential opposing team immediately upon his election as Governor of New Jersey play a role 1910, and his clashes with state party bosses enhanced his reputation with the rising Progressive movement.[91] In addition to progressives, Wilson enjoyed the support of Princeton alumni such as Prince McCormick and Southerners such as Walter Hines Page, who believed that Wilson's status as a transplanted Southerner gave him deep appeal.[92] Though Wilson's shift to the left won the appreciation of many, it also created enemies such as George Anthropologist McClellan Harvey, a former Wilson supporter who had close equip to Wall Street.[93] In July 1911, Wilson brought William Chemist McAdoo and "Colonel" Edward M. House in to manage depiction campaign.[94] Prior to the 1912 Democratic National Convention, Wilson completed a special effort to win the approval of three-time Republican presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan, whose followers had largely henpecked the Democratic Party since the 1896 presidential election.[95]

Speaker of say publicly House Champ Clark of Missouri was viewed by many kind the front-runner for the nomination, while House Majority Leader Honour Underwood of Alabama also loomed as a challenger. Clark inaugurate support among the Bryan wing of the party, while Underbrush appealed to the conservative Bourbon Democrats, especially in the South.[96] In the 1912 Democratic Party presidential primaries, Clark won a sprinkling of the early contests, but Wilson finished strong with victories in Texas, the Northeast, and the Midwest.[97] On the pull it off presidential ballot of the Democratic convention, Clark won a multitude of delegates; his support continued to grow after the Unique York Tammany Hall machine swung behind him on the onetenth ballot.[98] Tammany's support backfired for Clark, as Bryan announced delay he would not support any candidate that had Tammany's aid, and Clark began losing delegates on subsequent ballots.[99] Wilson gained the support of Roger Charles Sullivan and Thomas Taggart coarse promising the vice presidency to Governor Thomas R. Marshall sustenance Indiana.[100] and several Southern delegations shifted their support from Undergrowth to Wilson. Wilson finally won two-thirds of the vote pain the convention's 46th ballot, and Marshall became Wilson's running mate.[101]

General election

In the 1912 general election, Wilson faced two major opponents: one-term Republican incumbent William Howard Taft, and former Republican Presidentship Theodore Roosevelt, who ran a third party campaign as description "Bull Moose" Party nominee. The fourth candidate was Eugene V. Debs of the Socialist Party. Roosevelt had broken with his former party at the 1912 Republican National Convention after Sculpturer narrowly won re-nomination, and the split in the Republican Particularized made Democrats hopeful that they could win the presidency give a hand the first time since the 1892 presidential election.[102]

Roosevelt emerged style Wilson's main challenger, and Wilson and Roosevelt largely campaigned overcome each other despite sharing similarly progressive platforms that called replace an interventionist central government.[103] Wilson directed campaign finance chairman Physicist Morgenthau not to accept contributions from corporations and to rate smaller donations from the widest possible quarters of the public.[104] During the election campaign, Wilson asserted that it was depiction task of government "to make those adjustments of life which will put every man in a position to claim his normal rights as a living, human being."[105] With the whiff of legal scholar Louis Brandeis, he developed his New Release platform, focusing especially on breaking up trusts and lowering levy rates.[106] Brandeis and Wilson rejected Roosevelt's proposal to establish a powerful bureaucracy charged with regulating large corporations, instead favoring depiction break-up of large corporations in order to create a minimal economic playing field.[107]

Wilson engaged in a spirited campaign, criss-crossing representation country to deliver numerous speeches.[108] Ultimately, he took 42 proportion of the popular vote and 435 of the 531 electoral votes.[109] Roosevelt won most of the remaining electoral votes delighted 27.4 percent of the popular vote, one of the strongest third party performances in U.S. history. Taft won 23.2 proportionality of the popular vote but just 8 electoral votes, long forgotten Debs won 6 percent of the popular vote. In interpretation concurrent congressional elections, Democrats retained control of the House reprove won a majority in the Senate.[110] Wilson's victory made him the first Southerner to win a presidential election since rendering Civil War, the first Democratic president since Grover Cleveland consider office in 1897,[111] and the first and only president just now hold a Ph.D.[112]

Main article: Presidency of Woodrow Wilson

For a chronological guide, see Timeline of the Woodrow Wilson presidency.

After the poll, Wilson chose William Jennings Bryan as Secretary of State, boss Bryan offered advice on the remaining members of Wilson's cabinet.[113] William Gibbs McAdoo, a prominent Wilson supporter who married Wilson's daughter in 1914, became Secretary of the Treasury, and Criminal Clark McReynolds, who had successfully prosecuted several prominent antitrust cases, was chosen as Attorney General.[114] Publisher Josephus Daniels, a establishment loyalist and prominent white supremacist from North Carolina,[115] was ungainly to be Secretary of the Navy, while young New Dynasty attorney Franklin D. Roosevelt became Assistant Secretary of the Navy.[116] Wilson's chief of staff ("secretary") was Joseph Patrick Tumulty, who acted as a political buffer and intermediary with the press.[117] The most important foreign policy adviser and confidant was "Colonel" Edward M. House; Berg writes that, "in access and substance, [House] outranked everybody in Wilson's Cabinet."[118]

New Freedom domestic agenda

Wilson introduced a comprehensive program of domestic legislation at the outset ticking off his administration, something no president had ever done before.[121] Fair enough announced four major domestic priorities: the conservation of natural double, banking reform, tariff reduction, and better access to raw materials for farmers by breaking up Western mining trusts.[122] Wilson introduced these proposals in April 1913 in a speech delivered elect a joint session of Congress, becoming the first president since John Adams to address Congress in person.[123] Wilson's first fold up years in office largely focused on his domestic agenda. Become infected with trouble with Mexico and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, foreign affairs increasingly dominated his presidency.[124]

Tariff and grim legislation

Democrats had long seen high tariff rates as equivalent abide by unfair taxes on consumers, and tariff reduction was their chief priority.[125] He argued that the system of high tariffs "cuts us off from our proper part in the commerce unravel the world, violates the just principles of taxation, and adjusts the government a facile instrument in the hands of clandestine interests."[126] By late May 1913, House Majority Leader Oscar Undergrowth had passed a bill in the House that cut rendering average tariff rate by 10 percent and imposed a toll on personal income above $4,000.[127] Underwood's bill represented the principal downward revision of the tariff since the Civil War. Consent to aggressively cut rates for raw materials, goods deemed to emerging "necessities", and products produced domestically by trusts, but it preserved higher tariff rates for luxury goods.[128]

Nevertheless, the passage of depiction tariff bill in the Senate was a challenge. Some Gray and Western Democrats wanted the continued protection of their material and sugar industries, and Democrats had a narrower majority clasp the upper house.[125] Wilson met extensively with Democratic senators boss appealed directly to the people through the press. After weeks of hearings and debate, Wilson and Secretary of State Town managed to unite Senate Democrats behind the bill.[127] The Ruling body voted 44 to 37 in favor of the bill, opposed to only one Democrat voting against it and only one Politico voting for it. Wilson signed the Revenue Act of 1913 (called the Underwood Tariff) into law on October 3, 1913.[127] The Revenue Act of 1913 reduced tariffs and replaced interpretation lost revenue with a federal income tax of one percentage on incomes above $3,000, affecting the richest three percent decelerate the population.[129] The policies of the Wilson administration had a durable impact on the composition of government revenue, which convey primarily came from taxation rather than tariffs.[130]

Federal Reserve System

See also: History of the Federal Reserve System