Woodrow Wilson and Business-Government Relations During World War I

1969 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 385-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert D. Cuff
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Federal Trade Commission ◽  
Regulatory Agencies ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
White House ◽  
Government Relations ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Democratic Administration ◽  
Banking Committee

By the spring of 1914 Woodrow Wilson was clearly doing everything in his power to ingratiate the new Democratic Administration with the nation's business groups. He abandoned the Brandeisian spirit of trust-busting as part of his program for corporation control in favor of regulation by commission, a policy more in line with the sentiment among leading businessmen. (Indeed, the Federal Trade Commission established in 1915 soon showed that it would serve as the friend and not the enemy of business.) He directed personal appeals to businessmen both by letter and by informal conversations at the White House, and he made nominations to regulatory agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Reserve Board that left no doubt as to his sincerity in attracting business support. One of his choices for the Reserve Board, Thomas D. Jones, was at once a personal friend and a former trustee of Princeton University. But Jones was also a well-known member of the “Zinc Trust” and a director of the International Harvester Company then under indictment as a conspiracy in restraint of trade. Wilson campaigned hard for this appointment against strong Senatorial opposition even within his own party. At the same time, he declared publicly: “It would be particularly unfair to the Democratic Party and the Senate itself to regard it as the enemy of business, big or little.” Wilson was outraged when the Senate Banking Committee rejected his friend. “I believe the judgment and desire of the whole country cry out for a new temper in affairs,” he wrote rather despairingly to Jones. “We have breathed already too long the air of suspicion and distrust.”

Building a Democratic Majority: The Progressive Party Vote and the Federal Trade Commission

1995 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott C. James
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Party ◽  
Federal Trade Commission ◽  
Government Control ◽  
Theodore Roosevelt ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
Midterm Elections ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
Progressive Party

On 30 May 1914, Theodore Roosevelt fired the opening shots of the midterm elections against the party of Woodrow Wilson. Roosevelt framed the off-year elections as a referendum on the failures of the New Freedom, the Democrats' three-pronged program to curb the power of the trusts. Rather than bringing monopolies to heal, the former president asserted, Democratic policy had simply driven the economy into recession. “[T]he Democratic party,” Roosevelt explained on another occasion “has been engaged in what is fundamentally an effort to restore the unlimited competition of two generations back and to subject this to only an ineffective and weak government control”. To all, Roosevelt's counsel was constant: the prudent course of citizens that fall was to register a vote for social and industrial progress, to support the Progressive party candidate for Congress.

The Stern, Unflinching Performance of Duty

2019 ◽  
pp. 150-179
Author(s):  
John M. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Leadership Style ◽  
World War ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
White House ◽  
Limited Support ◽  
La Follette

Chapter 7 analyzes Roosevelt’s career after leaving the White House, with a focus on World War I. It considers his relationship with Woodrow Wilson and argues that, although TR disagreed with Wilson on key policies and regarding Wilson’s leadership style, his attacks on the president were personal and often so extreme that they were counterproductive. The chapter argues that though Roosevelt’s advocacy of two themes, preparedness and Americanism, initially attracted limited support, by 1916 he had begun to play a key role in shaping public discussions about the war. Though Roosevelt’s rhetoric was sometimes incendiary and contributed to discrimination against German-Americans and antiwar figures such as Senator Robert La Follette, by 1918 he emerged as a leading candidate for president in 1920. Only TR’s death, in early 1919, prevented his return to the pinnacle of US politics.

Wilson, Woodrow (1856–1924)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica Jovanovich-Kelley
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Law School ◽  
University Of Virginia ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Johns Hopkins University ◽  
The University

Thomas Woodrow Wilson served two terms as the twenty-eighth President of the United States (1913–1921) and is remembered for leading the nation through World War I. Wilson graduated from Princeton University in 1879 and briefly attended the University of Virginia Law School before earning his doctorate from the Johns Hopkins University in 1886. After an early career in academia, Wilson later became president of Princeton University (1902–1910) and served one term as governor of New Jersey (1911–1913). In the presidential election of 1912, Wilson was elected along with running mate Thomas R. Marshall on a Democratic platform that stressed individualism and states’ rights.

Joel Spingarn's “Constructive Programme” and the Wartime Antilynching Bill of 1918

1992 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Ellis
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
Mob Violence ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
Colored People ◽  
War Department ◽  
Democratic Administration ◽  
National Emergency ◽  
The Military ◽  
Congressional Action

In the summer of 1918, the white chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Major Joel E. Spingarn, called for urgent congressional action on mob violence. He seized the opportunity of a post in the Military Intelligence Branch (MIB) of the War Department General Staff in Washington, D.C., to put forward a “constructive programme,” the central idea of which was the passage of a bill to make lynching in wartime a federal offense. Attempting to exploit the peculiar circumstances of the national emergency and the expansion of federal powers during World War I, Spingarn also proposed a series of more modest initiatives designed to lessen discrimination and raise black morale. The official reaction to the arguments he advanced in support of his program sheds light on the reluctance of the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson to develop a policy on race relations. It also suggests some of the problems and hazards facing a would-be reformer working from within.

Woodrow Wilson: Man and Statesman

1956 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert H. Ferrell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
White House ◽  
College Professors ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
College Professor ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

It is now thirty-two years since the death of Woodrow Wilson, one hundred years since his birth, and still the place in history of this Southerner who became president of Princeton University and later President of the United States remains somewhat uncertain. Wilson will rank among the great American presidents, but precisely where his reputation will come to rest is at present difficult to say. His public life has been the subject of intense scholarly investigation. College professors of history and political science have found his career fascinating (perhaps, one suspects, because he was the only college professor to reach the White House). But they have been unable to make up their minds about him. There is a passionate air in the historians' appraisals of Wilson, and more than a hint of assertion and argument, and beneath even the most calm and apparently measured accounts there is intellectual heat of a sort that betrays uncertainty about the stature of the man.

Woodrow Wilson and the Democratic Party

1956 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur S. Link
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Party ◽  
National Party ◽  
Previous Knowledge ◽  
Party Organization ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
White House ◽  
Party Government ◽  
Public Leadership ◽  
Legislative Branch ◽  
Responsible Party

Few Presidents in American history established so complete and far-reaching a control over his party as did Woodrow Wilson during the first years of his tenure in the White House.* Indeed, before the end of his first term he had become almost the absolute master of his party, able to effect revolutionary changes in party policy without the previous knowledge and consent of Democratic leaders in Congress and the country. He attained this stature in part by his methods of public leadership—his bold representation of public opinion and his incomparable strategy in dealing with the legislative branch. He won this position of authority also through less obvious and more subtle means—a systematic use of the immense patronage at his command as an instrument by which to achieve effective and responsible party government. Confronted by no entrenched national party organization and no body of officeholders loyal to another man, he was able to build from the ground up and to weld the widely scattered and disparate Democratic forces into something approximating a national machine. Let us see how he used his power to mold the character of his party, and with what consequences.

The Mexican-German Conspiracy of 1915

1966 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Meyer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Mexico ◽  
World War I ◽  
Foreign Minister ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
German Government ◽  
White House ◽  
Good Percentage

The Zimmermann telegram of 1917, the attempt of the German government to bring Mexico into World War I on the side of the Central Powers, is a well-known diplomatic episode because it is generally conceded to be one of the series of factors which convinced President Woodrow Wilson of the efficacy of abandoning his policy of neutrality. In return for her co-operation, and upon the successful conclusion of the war, Mexico was to “recover the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.” On March 1, 1917, when the incident was recorded in the United States press and before either the State Department or the White House issued a confirmation or a denial, many congressmen and a good percentage of the United States public considered the note to be a brazen forgery and a great hoax. Had they realized that Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann’s proposal to Venustiano Carranza was not a bold and newly devised scheme but rather the climax of several years of intrigue with various Mexican officials and exile groups and had they been aware that the idea of restoring the territory lost in the middle of the nineteenth century was a Mexican rather than a German idea, there would have been but little reason to dispute the validity of the document in question.

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