The Wilsonian Persuasion in American Foreign Policy By Matthew C ...

Growing up in Augusta, Georgia, Wilson’s earliest memories were of the election of Abraham Lincoln, and the approach of war. The impact of the Civil War, that terrible trial run for industrial age warfare, never left him.

Wilson enrolled at Princeton University in 1875; he was a diligent if unexceptional student, and graduated four years later. After studying law at the University of Virginia and finding law practice unfulfilling, he entered the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1883, pursuing a political science PhD in anticipation of a teaching career. He flourished at Hopkins, emerging as a bright and articulate graduate student, standing out among an exceptional cohort of peers. Wilson’s dissertation, entitled Congressional Government, was published as a book in 1885, a year before he received his doctorate. The work is still read today as a classic study of the American policymaking system. That year, he married Ellen Axson, by all accounts a blissful union which produced three daughters.

In 1890 Wilson accepted a teaching position at his alma mater, Princeton, where for the next several years he distinguished himself as a popular lecturer and prolific author. In 1902, after being chosen to be the university’s president, he initiated an aggressive campaign to improve instruction and tighten admittance standards at Princeton, which had been as much a finishing school for the sons of elite families as a serious institution of higher learning. “Princeton is getting to be nothing but a damned educational institution,” one disgruntled son wrote home.⁶

Wilson’s growing reputation prompted New Jersey’s Democratic Party leaders to back him in a bid for the governorship in 1910, and upon being elected he became an aggressive reformer, pushing public utility regulation through the state legislature, along with municipal reform, workmen’s compensation and anti-trust legislation. In 1912, now the leading progressive in the country, Wilson received the Democratic party’s presidential nomination in 1912, and in a three-man race against Republican William Howard Taft, and Teddy Roosevelt (who was running as a third-party candidate on the Progressive or “Bull Moose” party ticket), Wilson won with his call for a “New Freedom,” which entailed tariff cuts, banking reform and stronger anti-trust laws. He was the first Democrat elected in a generation.