Woodrow Wilson

Biography

Thomas Woodrow Wilson began life as a Virginia-born scholar and ended it as the globe-trotting idealist who steered America onto the world stage. After reshaping Princeton from a genteel college into a research powerhouse, he swapped academic robes for New Jersey’s governorship in 1910; two whirlwind years later he out-maneuvered Taft and Roosevelt to seize the White House in 1912. Over the next eight years Wilson rewrote the economic rulebook—crafting the Federal Reserve, launching the income tax, and polishing antitrust law—then pivoted from domestic engineer to wartime commander-in-chief, asking Congress in April 1917 for the declaration that flung two million doughboys across the Atlantic. At Versailles he fought for his brainchild, the League of Nations, and left behind the doctrine that still bears his name: Wilsonianism, the belief that democracy, open markets, and collective security can outrun the old contagion of power politics.