Wilson, Woodrow (1856–1924)

Woodrow Wilson was among the first generation of U.S. professional political scientists and historians and went on to become the nation's twenty-eighth president. Schooled by his father in the power of oratory in political leadership, Wilson attended Princeton University and became fascinated with the workings of constitutions and the open debate he believed the British parliamentary system fostered. Following graduation in 1879, Wilson published “Cabinet Government in the United States,” an article arguing that Congressional debates had become too removed from public opinion and that Congress should be replaced with the parliamentary system to restore American political leadership.

Hoping for a political career, Wilson entered law school at the University of Virginia in 1879, spending a year and half there before dropping out to finish his studies at home. Passing the Georgia bar in 1882, he opened a practice but quickly soured on this career. In 1883, he enrolled in graduate study in political science and history at the Johns Hopkins University, explaining that the law in practice interested him far less than its philosophical underpinnings. Wilson resigned himself to an academic life on the periphery of politics. His dissertation, Congressional Government (1885), was an innovative and unprecedented analysis of the way American government actually worked. He extended the argument presented in “Cabinet Government,” criticizing the separation of powers and the Byzantine committee structure of Congress for preventing true public debate.

Receiving a PhD in 1886, Wilson taught in Pennsylvania and Connecticut before returning to Princeton as a professor in 1890. The period between 1886 and 1908 proved productive for Wilson's studies on law and government. In 1887, he published “The Study of Administration” in Political Science Quarterly, establishing himself as an important thinker in the growing field of scientific administration. In 1899, he published The State, an influential comparative history of democratic institutions. His last major work, Constitutional Government in the United States (1908), [Page 1586]concluded that a powerful president might replace an absentee Congress in leading debate on national issues.

After serving as president of Princeton (1902–1910), and governor of New Jersey (1910–1912), Wilson was elected to the White House for two terms (1913–1921). There his academic work translated into policies pairing economic and political decentralization with strong presidential leadership. Domestically, Wilson endorsed measures that he believed would democratize economic opportunity, namely the Underwood Tariff (1913), Federal Reserve (1913), and Federal Trade (1914) acts. Although he sought a decentralized mobilization for U.S. participation in World War I (1917–1918), eventually Wilson assumed vast executive power to coordinate the military and economy in the public interest. At the international level, he personally drafted the League of Nations charter at Versailles in 1919, aspiring to maintain world peace by establishing a forum for open debate of international issues.