#TBT: Woodrow Wilson Makes History One Last Time

     Woodrow Wilson, head of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey, was elected president in 1912 with a resounding Democratic victory. He laid the foundation for modern liberalism by regulating trusts, providing assistance to farmers, establishing labor regulations, protecting the environment, granting women the right to vote, and leading an active foreign policy that guided America through the Great War, led to formulation of the League of Nations, and earned him the Nobel Peace Prize. 

     Wilson's environmental legacy was significant. He created the National Park Service to manage all the protected areas in the United States and created dozens during his time in the White House, including Arcadia, Rocky Mountain, Grand Canyon, Zion, and other famous facets of the park system. He signed the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and other wildlife protection measures, and his efforts against trusts helped lay the foundation for future regulation of businesses, including on environmental matters.

     Wilson was the furthest thing from perfect. He was known as an intellectual, and one would think the fact that he was born in antebellum Virginia and raised in Georgia would not preclude him from saving America's black population from a resurgence in racial violence. His advocacy for the League of Nations induced the final of a series of strokes he suffered during his life, and the final year of his presidency saw Wilson almost an invalid unable to handle the Spanish Flu pandemic, stop the Palmer Raids conducted by his own attorney general, get a grip on a postwar economy, and more aggressively oppose the Volstead Act (banning alcohol; Wilson vetoed it but had his veto overridden).

     In spite of this, Wilson is considered a better president than most because he left the country better in the long run than when he took office. Wilson spent his final years bedridden in Washington, D.C., feebly failing to match the writing that made him one of the more notable literary figures of the progressive movement, and, on, February 3rd, 1924, Woodrow Wilson made history one last time, becoming the only president to be interred in the National Cathedral upon his death.