Woodrow Wilson

Who was Woodrow Wilson?

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of the United States, in office from 1913 to 1921. 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 the Republican Party split in 1912, he was elected as a Democrat.

In his first term as President, Wilson persuaded a Democratic Congress to pass a legislative agenda that few presidents have equaled, remaining unmatched up until the New Deal in 1933. This agenda included the Federal Reserve Act, Federal Trade Commission Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, the Federal Farm Loan Act and an income tax. Child labor was curtailed by the Keating–Owen Act of 1916, but the U.S. Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1918. Wilson also had Congress pass the Adamson Act, which imposed an 8-hour workday for railroads. Wilson, at first unsympathetic, became a major advocate for women's suffrage after public pressure convinced him that to oppose women's suffrage was politically unwise. Although Wilson promised African Americans "fair dealing...in advancing the interests of their race in the United States", the Wilson administration implemented a policy of racial segregation for federal employees. Although considered a modern liberal visionary giant as President, in terms of implementing domestic race relations, however, Wilson was "deeply racist in his thoughts and politics, and apparently was comfortable being so."

Famous Quotes:

• I would rather fail in a cause that will ultimately succeed than succeed in a cause that will ultimately fail.
• No man can worship God or love his neighbor on an empty stomach.
• All things come to him who waits -- provided he knows what he is waiting for.
• Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end and prefer the interest of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.
• You cannot be friends upon any other terms than upon the terms of equality.
• The nation's honor is dearer than the nation's comfort; yes, than the nation's life itself.
• Fear God and you need not fear anyone else.
• No man has ever risen to the real stature of spiritual manhood until he has found that it is finer to serve somebody else than it is to serve himself.
• No thoughtful man ever came to the end of his life, and had time and a little space of calm from which to look back upon it, who did not know and acknowledge that it was what he had done unselfishly and for others, and nothing else, that satisfied him in the retrospect, and made him feel that he had played the man.
• You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.