The first major biography of America’s twenty-eighth president in nearly two decades, from one of America’s foremost Woodrow Wilson scholars. A Democrat who reclaimed the White House after sixteen years of Republican administrations, Wilson was a transformative president—he helped create the regulatory bodies and legislation that prefigured FDR’s New Deal and would prove central to governance through the early twenty-first century, including the Federal Reserve system and the Clayton Antitrust Act; he guided the nation through World War I; and, although his advocacy in favor of joining the League of Nations proved unsuccessful, he nonetheless established a new way of thinking about international relations that would carry America into the United Nations era. Yet Wilson also steadfastly resisted progress for civil rights, while his attorney general launched an aggressive attack on civil liberties. Even as he reminds us of the foundational scope of Wilson’s domestic policy achievements, John Milton Cooper, Jr., reshapes our understanding of the man himself: his Wilson is warm and gracious—not at all the dour puritan of popular imagination. As the president of Princeton, his encounters with the often rancorous battles of academe prepared him for state and national politics. Just two years after he was elected governor of New Jersey, Wilson, now a leader in the progressive movement, won the Democratic presidential nomination and went on to defeat Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft in one of the twentieth century’s most memorable presidential elections. Ever the professor, Wilson relied on the strength of his intellectual convictions and the power of reason to win over the American people. John Milton Cooper, Jr., gives us a vigorous, lasting record of Wilson’s life and achievements. This is a long overdue, revelatory portrait of one of our most important presidents—particularly resonant now, as another president seeks to change the way government relates to the people and regulates the economy.

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From the Ivy League to the oval office, Woodrow Wilson was the only professional scholar to become a U.S. president. A professor of history and political science, Wilson became the dynamic president of Princeton University in 1902 and was one of its most prolific scholars before entering active politics. Through his labors as student, scholar, and statesman, he left a legacy of elegant writings on everything from educational reform to religion to history and politics. Woodrow Wilson: Essential Writings and Speeches of the Scholar-President collects Wilson’s most influential work, from early essays on religion to his famous “Fourteen Points” speech, which introduced the idea of the League of Nations. Among the last of the presidents to write his own speeches, Wilson left behind works which offer impressive insights into his mind and his age. Deeply religious, Wilson looked to his faith to guide his life and wrote candidly about the connection. A passionate advocate of liberal learning, he broadcast his ideas on educational reform with missionary intensity. In politics he moved from a traditional nineteenth-century conservative view of government to a progressive, international vision which transformed American politics in the new century. His writings allow us to trace the intellectual struggle that took the nation from a position of neutrality in World War I to its role as a central player on the world stage. Penetrating and eloquent, the works gathered here represent the best and the most important of Wilson’s writings that retain enduring interest. A rich repository of ideas on the American people and America’s purpose in the world, these works reveal the thoughts of one of the most acute analysts and actors in the drama of American politics.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author, "a brilliant biography"* of the 28th president of the United States. *Doris Kearns Goodwin One hundred years after his inauguration, Woodrow Wilson still stands as one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century, and one of the most enigmatic. And now, after more than a decade of research and writing, Pulitzer Prize–winning author A. Scott Berg has completed Wilson—the most personal and penetrating biography ever written about the twenty-eighth President. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of documents in the Wilson Archives, Berg was the first biographer to gain access to two recently discovered caches of papers belonging to those close to Wilson. From this material, Berg was able to add countless details—even several unknown events—that fill in missing pieces of Wilson’s character, and cast new light on his entire life. From the visionary Princeton professor who constructed a model for higher education in America to the architect of the ill-fated League of Nations, from the devout Commander in Chief who ushered the country through its first great World War to the widower of intense passion and turbulence who wooed a second wife with hundreds of astonishing love letters, from the idealist determined to make the world “safe for democracy” to the stroke-crippled leader whose incapacity—and the subterfuges around it—were among the century’s greatest secrets, from the trailblazer whose ideas paved the way for the New Deal and the Progressive administrations that followed to the politician whose partisan battles with his opponents left him a broken man, and ultimately, a tragic figure—this is a book at once magisterial and deeply emotional about the whole of Wilson’s life, accomplishments, and failings. This is not just Wilson the icon—but Wilson the man. INCLUDES PHOTOGRAPHS