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Essay on Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson was one of America's greatest Presidents. His domestic program expanded the role of the federal government in managing the economy and protecting the interests of citizens. His foreign policy established a new vision of America's role in the world. And he helped to make the White House the center of power in Washington. Most historians rank him among the five most important American Presidents, along with Washington, Lincoln, and the two Roosevelts.
Born in Virginia in 1856 and raised in Georgia and South Carolina, Wilson's early memories included seeing Yankee soldiers marching into Augusta at the end of the Civil War. Wilson's father was a Presbyterian minister who fervently supported the South's secession from the Union. Because of the war's disruption, much of Wilson's early education came from his father at home. In 1875, he entered Princeton, graduating in 1879. After a brief period at the law school of the University of Virginia, he studied on his own and passed the Georgia bar examination. Bored as a lawyer in Atlanta, he enrolled at Johns Hopkins University, where he earned a Ph.D. in history and political science in 1886.
After a successful academic career as an author and professor at Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan, and Princeton, Wilson was elected president of Princeton in 1902. In that office, his efforts to modernize the college brought him attention as a progressive reformer, and in 1910, New Jersey Democrats approached him about running for governor. Wilson accepted, but on the condition that their support came with "no strings attached."
Rapid Rise to National Power
From this point, Wilson's rise to national power was astonishingly rapid. As governor of New Jersey, he immediately began to fight machine politics and party bosses, securing campaign finance reform, a primary law permitting voters rather than party bosses to nominate candidates, and a program to compensate workers injured on the job....
