Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) was a political scientist, president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey before winning the presidency as a Democrat in 1912, when the Republican vote split between William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt. His domestic program, the New Freedom, aimed to restore competition by lowering tariffs, reforming banking and policing monopolies. He kept the country neutral in World War I until 1917, then asked Congress to declare war on Germany, and became the main architect of the League of Nations, which the U.S. Senate declined to join.

Supporters credit Wilson with building much of the modern federal economic framework, including the Federal Reserve and the income tax, and with articulating a liberal internationalism that influenced the United Nations and later U.S. foreign policy. Critics on both left and right point to wartime limits on speech and the imprisonment of dissenters such as Socialist leader Eugene Debs. His administration's segregation of the federal workforce has drawn strong criticism and prompted institutions associated with him to reassess his legacy. Realist scholars also question whether his idealism matched the outcomes of the Versailles settlement.