Woodrow Wilson, Last of the Virginians

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was perhaps the most educated of all the presidents. He graduated from Princeton University in 1879 and the University of Virginia Law School. Later, in 1886, he received a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University and then taught at Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan, and Princeton. Wilson would serve two terms as president of the United States, the last of the Virginia presidents (to date) and the eighth in the Virginia line after Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Harrison, Tyler, and Taylor.

Interestingly, Wilson’s political career did not begin in his home state. As president of Princeton University for eight years, Wilson was known in New Jersey, and although he was a political novice, the Democratic Party sought him in 1910 to run for governor of the state. Upon election, his reform measures were passed regularly during the first part of his term, but a Republican legislature just as regularly shot down his initiatives after 1912. Gaining the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1914 was actually harder than winning the presidency itself; it took more than forty ballots at the Democratic convention, but Wilson was finally given the nomination. The split over the Republican vote between William Howard Taft and the Progressive Party candidate, former president Theodore Roosevelt, resulted in Wilson’s ascent to the White House.

Former National Portrait Gallery historian Frederick Voss writes of Wilson’s presidency:

Measured on the basis of its domestic reforms, Wilson’s administration was singularly successful. But when World War I forced him into a role of international leadership, Wilson met with tragic failure. Reluctantly declaring war on Germany in 1917, he brought an international idealism to his wartime leadership that called for an un-vindictive peace agreement after Germany was defeated.

Wilson suffered a stroke in September of 1919 while on a cross-country trip promoting the Treaty of Versailles. During the remaining years of his second term, his second wife, Edith, severely restricted access to her husband. and some historians have conspiratorially posited that Mrs. Wilson was actually making many decisions for the chief executive during that period.

Although his plans for European recovery from the Great War were never realized, Wilson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919. Thomas Woodrow Wilson retired from office to his private residence on S Street NW in Washington, D.C., and died in 1924, never having fully recovered from the stroke that rendered his final years in office moot.

This portrait of President Woodrow Wilson, by John Christen Johansen, is on view at the National Portrait Gallery, in "America's Presidents," the nation’s only complete collection of presidential portraits outside the White House.

Source:
Frederick Voss, Portraits of the Presidents (New York: National Portrait Gallery in association with Rizzoli, 2000).