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.
Contemporary American began in the first two decades of this century. These were the years in which two of our greatest presidents—Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson—transformed the office into the center of power; in which the United States entered the world stage and fought its first overseas war; in which the government's proper role in the economy became a public question; and in which reform became an imperative for muckraking reporters, progressive politicians, social activists, and writers. It was a golden age in American politics, when fundamental ideas were given compelling expression by thoughtful candidates. It was a trying time, however, for many Americans, including women who fought for the vote, blacks who began organizing to secure their rights, and activists on the Left who lost theirs in the first Red Scare of the century. John Cooper's panoramic history of this period shows us where we came from and sheds light on where we are.
The colossal figures who shaped the politics of industrial America emerge in full scale in this comparative biography. In the depth and sophistication of intellect that they brought to politics and in the titanic conflict they waged, Roosevelt and Wilson were, like Hamilton and Jefferson before them, the political architects for an entire century.
The varied career of Walter Hines Page affected many facets of the American political and social milieu from the end of Reconstruction through World War I. A North Carolinian, Page was one of the first southerners after Reconstruction to argue that sectional hostility was needless, and he constantly worked to restore national union and frequently acted as an interpreter for the North and the South. As a journalist, publisher, reformer, president-maker, and ambassador, he strove to assure both North and South that the southerner was basically an American, that southern problems were national ones, and that education and hard work could recreate the Union. As a young man, Page found the South too stifling to give scope to his ambitions. He left it for good at the age of twenty-nine to make a brilliant career as editor and book publisher in the North. He served as editor of Forum, Atlantic Monthly, and World's Work. Later he founded the publishing firm Doubleday, Page & Company. As a magazine editor he wrote about the problems of the South; as a book publisher he introduced many southern writers to the nation; as a member of several of the most powerful philanthropic boards he sought funds to improve education and public health in the South. As a result of his early support of Woodrow Wilson for the presidency, Page was appointed ambassador to the Court of St. James's from which he fervently advocated the Allied cause. Throughly researching both American and British government documents and private papers, and using interviews with Page's contemporaries, Cooper reinterprets and establishes the significance of Page's career. Originally published in 1977. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
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