Woodrow Wilson: Princeton Eating Clubs, Segregated Clerks and a Stroke

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Woodrow Wilson was three years old in Augusta, Georgia, when a passing stranger announced that Lincoln's election meant war. He became the only U.S. president with a PhD, earned at Johns Hopkins, and taught at Bryn Mawr and Wesleyan before becoming president of Princeton in 1902. There he introduced small-group preceptorials, but wealthy alumni blocked his plan to replace the exclusive eating clubs with residential quadrangles, and he lost a fight over where to put the graduate school. New Jersey's Democratic bosses made him governor in 1910 expecting a figurehead. He refused to back boss James Smith Jr. for the Senate and passed a corrupt practices act and workers' compensation. In 1912, with Republicans split between Taft and Roosevelt, he won the presidency with 41.8 percent of the vote.

His New Freedom agenda created the Federal Reserve with 12 regional banks, cut tariffs while adding the income tax, established the Federal Trade Commission and passed the Clayton Antitrust Act, and he pushed Louis Brandeis onto the Supreme Court. He also allowed the segregation of the federal workforce. He kept the country neutral after the Lusitania, won 1916 on the slogan He kept us out of war, then sought war on April 2, 1917, after renewed submarine attacks and the Zimmermann Telegram. His Fourteen Points and League of Nations won him the Nobel Peace Prize, but he refused Henry Cabot Lodge's reservations, and after his October 1919 stroke the Senate rejected the treaty.

• He broke a century-old precedent by delivering the State of the Union in person to Congress.
• Black federal clerks were separated from white coworkers by screens and cages, and Black supervisors were demoted or fired.
• The Birth of a Nation was screened at the White House, though Wilson later said he had not known its content.
• After the Lusitania sinking he said there is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight.
• After his stroke, Edith Wilson and physician Cary Grayson controlled access to the sickroom, deciding what papers reached him.