Woodrow Wilson: The Years of Preparation. By John M. Mulder. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978. 306 pp. $16.50

1980 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 164-165
Author(s):  
P. A. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
Princeton University

In His Day: Awareness of Wilson’s Duplicity

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 762-763 ◽  
Author(s):  
Desmond Jagmohan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
History Of ◽  
Complex Landscape ◽  
American Political Science

Woodrow Wilson is the only American political scientist to have served as President of the United States. In the time between his political science Ph.D. (from Johns Hopkins, in 1886) and his tenure as president (1913–21), he also served as president of Princeton University (1902–10) and president of the American Political Science Association (1909–10). Wilson is one of the most revered figures in American political thought and in American political science. The Woodrow Wilson Award is perhaps APSA’s most distinguished award, given annually for the best book on government, politics, or international affairs published in the previous year, and sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation at Princeton University.Wilson has also recently become the subject of controversy, on the campus of Princeton University, and in the political culture more generally, in connection with racist statements that he made and the segregationist practices of his administration. A group of Princeton students associated with the “Black Lives Matter” movement has demanded that Wilson’s name be removed from two campus buildings, one of which is the famous Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (see Martha A. Sandweiss, “Woodrow Wilson, Princeton, and the Complex Landscape of Race,” http://www.thenation.com/article/woodrow-wilson-princeton-and-the-complex-landscape-of-race/). Many others have resisted this idea, noting that Wilson is indeed an important figure in the history of twentieth-century liberalism and Progressivism in the United States.A number of colleagues have contacted me suggesting that Perspectives ought to organize a symposium on the Wilson controversy. Although we do not regularly organize symposia around current events, given the valence of the controversy and its connection to issues we have featured in our journal (see especially the September 2015 issue on “The American Politics of Policing and Incarceration”), and given Wilson's importance in the history of our discipline, we have decided to make an exception in this case. We have thus invited a wide range of colleagues whose views on this issue will interest our readers to comment on this controversy. —Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor.

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.”

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