When, on March 4, 1913, Woodrow Wilson entered the White House, the first
Democratic president elected in twenty years, no one could have guessed
the importance of the role which he was destined to play. While business
men and industrial leaders bewailed the mischance that had brought into
power a man whose attitude towards vested interests was reputed none too
friendly, they looked upon him as a temporary inconvenience. Nor did the
increasingly large body of independent voters, disgusted by the
"stand-pattism" of the Republican machine, regard Wilson much more
seriously; rather did they place their confidence in a reinvigoration of
the Grand Old Party through the progressive leadership of Roosevelt,
whose enthusiasm and practical vision had attracted the approval of more
than four million voters in the preceding election, despite his lack of
an adequate political organization. Even those who supported Wilson most
whole-heartedly believed that his work would lie entirely within the
field of domestic reform; little did they imagine that he would play a
part in world affairs larger than had fallen to any citizen of the United
States since the birth of the country.

The new President was fifty-six years old. His background was primarily
academic, a fact which, together with his Scotch-Irish ancestry, the
Presbyterian tradition of his family, and his early years spent in the
South, explains much in his character at the time when he entered upon
the general political stage. After graduating from Princeton in 1879,
where his career gave little indication of extraordinary promise, he
studied law, and for a time his shingle hung out in Atlanta. He seemed
unfitted by nature, however, for either pleasure or success in the
practice of the law. Reserved and cold, except with his intimates, he was
incapable of attracting clients in a profession and locality where
ability to "mix" was a prime qualification. A certain lack of tolerance
for the failings of his fellow mortals may have combined with his
Presbyterian conscience to disgust him with the hard give-and-take of the
struggling lawyer's life. He sought escape in graduate work in history
and politics at Johns Hopkins, where, in 1886, he received his Ph.D. for
a thesis entitled _Congressional Government_, a study remarkable for
clear thinking and felicitous expression. These qualities characterized
his work as a professor at Bryn Mawr and Wesleyan and paved his path to
an appointme