60 Fun Facts About Woodrow Wilson

Which sitting president did Wilson defeat in 1912?

William Howard Taft carried only Utah and Vermont as Wilson became the 28th president; nine years later he got the job he had long wanted, Chief Justice of the United States.

In which Virginia town was Wilson born, in the manse of his father's Presbyterian church?

Staunton. As president-elect in 1912 he came back for his 56th birthday and slept two nights in the manse where he was born, now part of his presidential library.

During World War I, which animals did the Wilsons put on the White House lawn to keep the grass cut?

Sheep. The flock saved on manpower in wartime, and its wool was auctioned for the benefit of the Red Cross.

Besides Wilson, which US president was a citizen of the Confederacy, even winning a seat in its Congress?

John Tyler died in January 1862 before he could take that seat, and the United States government gave the former president's death no official recognition.

Wilson's 1887 journal article made him a founding father of which academic field?

Public administration. His essay 'The Study of Administration' argued that running a government deserved study in its own right, apart from the politics that set its goals.

Wilson taught at Wesleyan University in Connecticut from 1888, where he also did what for the school?

Wilson coached the football team and also got Wesleyan students to organise a debating society run as a 'House of Commons'.

Wilson served as president of which university from 1902 to 1910?

Princeton got stiffer standards under Wilson, who hired dozens of young 'preceptors' to guide students in small groups and appointed its first Jewish and first Catholic professors.

As a university president, Wilson tried and failed to abolish which exclusive student institutions?

The upper-class eating clubs were to give way to residential quadrangles shared by all four classes, but furious alumni got Wilson's plan defeated.

Wilson served as governor of which state before winning the presidency?

New Jersey's Democratic bosses backed Wilson expecting a naive professor they could steer, but he declared his independence at once and pushed through reforms that cut their power.

Which political machine's backing tainted Wilson's rival Champ Clark at the 1912 convention?

Tammany Hall swung New York's votes to Clark and gave him a majority, but the boss backing turned the party's progressives against him, and Wilson finally won on the 46th ballot.

Which former president ran against Wilson in 1912 as the 'Bull Moose' third-party candidate?

Theodore Roosevelt bolted the Republicans after losing their nomination fight, and the split let Wilson carry 40 states.

Wilson won in 1912 with under 42 percent of the vote, the lowest winning share since which president?

Abraham Lincoln won a four-way race in 1860 with about 40 percent, and Wilson's share was low for the same reason: his opponents had split a party between them.

Which Socialist won six percent against Wilson in 1912, his party's highest presidential share?

Eugene V. Debs ran again in 1920 from a federal prison cell in Atlanta, where he was serving ten years for an anti-war speech made during Wilson's presidency.

Wilson was the first Southerner elected president since which Mexican-American War general won in 1848?

Zachary Taylor was the last until Wilson, whose Southern-born Cabinet members were soon allowed to segregate federal departments such as the Post Office and the Treasury.

Which legal scholar helped craft Wilson's 'New Freedom' and later became his Supreme Court nominee?

Louis Brandeis's 1916 nomination set off a four-month Senate fight over his attacks on big business and his religion before he became the first Jewish justice.

Which Wilson Secretary of State resigned in 1915 over the response to a liner sinking?

William Jennings Bryan quit in June 1915, convinced that Wilson's stern protest notes to Germany would drag the country into an unnecessary war.

Wilson revived the spoken address to Congress, a custom ended in 1801 by which president?

Thomas Jefferson sent his messages in writing instead, reportedly because a speech to lawmakers smacked of a king addressing Parliament, and every president followed suit until Wilson in 1913.

Which institution did Wilson sign into being two days before Christmas 1913?

The Federal Reserve was a compromise between private and government control: bankers would run twelve regional reserve banks, but under a board appointed by the president.

Which watchdog agency did Wilson create in 1914 to police unfair business practices?

The Federal Trade Commission could investigate and publicise unfair practices, and weeks later the Clayton Act spelled out which ones were banned while shielding unions from antitrust suits.

The Keating–Owen Act, signed by Wilson, barred goods made with what from interstate trade?

Child labor was the target, but the Supreme Court struck the law down in 1918, and a lasting federal ban had to wait for the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

Wilson's first wife Ellen, who had a skylit studio installed at the White House, had trained as what?

A painter by training, Ellen Wilson kept working as First Lady, and her death in 1914 spurred Congress to pass the slum-housing bill she had campaigned for.

Which silent epic drew protests after Wilson's White House screening in 1915?

The Birth of a Nation cast the Ku Klux Klan as heroes, and within months of its release a new Klan, inspired by the film, was founded in Georgia.

Which Mexican city did Wilson order the Navy to occupy in 1914 after an incident at Tampico?

Veracruz was seized within two weeks of the brief arrest of American sailors up the coast, and its loss so weakened General Huerta that he gave up power that July.

Which revolutionary did Wilson's troops hunt in Mexico after a 1916 border raid?

Pancho Villa was never caught: several thousand US soldiers chased him through northern Mexico for months, clashed with Mexican government troops instead and came home empty-handed.

Which liner's 1915 sinking, killing over a hundred Americans, tested Wilson's neutrality?

RMS Lusitania went down within sight of the Irish coast, and three days later Wilson told a Philadelphia crowd there was such a thing as a man being 'too proud to fight'.

Which holiday did Wilson make official in 1914, only for its founder to campaign later for its abolition?

Mother's Day was Anna Jarvis's creation, but she came to loathe the trade in cards and flowers it spawned and spent her later years trying to get it struck from the calendar.

Edith Wilson claimed descent from which famous Native American woman?

Pocahontas topped the family tree that Virginia's Bollings prized, yet Edith, the seventh of eleven children in rural Wytheville, had little formal schooling.

Democrats campaigned for Wilson's 1916 re-election under which slogan?

He Kept Us Out of War carried Wilson to a narrow win in November 1916, and five months later he was asking Congress to declare war on Germany.

Which Supreme Court justice resigned from the bench to run against Wilson in 1916?

Charles Evans Hughes gave up a seat for life and lost narrowly, yet he returned to the Court in 1930 as Chief Justice.

Wilson's 1916 re-election hung for two days on which Western state, which he carried by a sliver?

California tipped the election, and Wilson's Republican rival may have thrown it away there by slighting the state's Progressive governor, Hiram Johnson, while campaigning.

The Zimmermann Telegram promised Texas, Arizona and which other US state to Germany's would-be ally?

New Mexico, Texas and Arizona were the bait for Mexico to join Germany, but British codebreakers deciphered the cable and passed it to Washington weeks before America entered the war.

In April 1917 Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany chiefly because of which policy?

Unrestricted submarine warfare was a calculated German gamble: Berlin knew it would probably bring America in, but hoped to win before US troops could arrive in force.

On January 8, 1918, Wilson laid out his war aims in a speech known by what name?

The Fourteen Points were dropped over German lines as leaflets, and that October Germany's new chancellor asked Wilson for an armistice on those terms.

In his 1917 war message to Congress, Wilson said the world 'must be made safe for' what?

Democracy was the cause Wilson gave Congress; four days later it declared war, over the 'no' of Jeannette Rankin, the first woman to sit in the House.

Wilson put journalist George Creel in charge of which wartime effort in 1917?

War propaganda was the business of Creel's Committee on Public Information, whose volunteer 'Four Minute Men' gave short patriotic speeches wherever a crowd gathered, from theaters to street corners.

Whom did Wilson pick to command the American Expeditionary Forces sent to France in 1917?

John J. Pershing, with Wilson's backing, refused to feed American soldiers into British and French units, keeping them a separate army merely 'associated' with the Allies.

Wilson became the first sitting president to travel to Europe when he attended which gathering?

The Paris Peace Conference made Wilson a hero in Europe, where huge crowds turned out to cheer him, but he had left Senate Republicans out of his delegation.

Wilson personally presided over the committee that drafted the Covenant of which organisation?

The League of Nations was Wilson's own design, yet his country never joined it, because the Senate refused the treaty that contained its Covenant.

Which honour did an American diplomat accept on the ailing Wilson's behalf in December 1920?

The Nobel Peace Prize for 1919 was first held back because the committee found no nominee worthy, then given to Wilson in 1920 and accepted for him by the US minister to Norway.

The senators who completely opposed joining Wilson's proposed world body were known by what nickname?

The Irreconcilables were the smaller faction, but they got their way when Wilson's own loyalists joined them in voting the amended treaty down.

Which Republican senator demanded reservations to the Treaty of Versailles that Wilson refused to accept?

Henry Cabot Lodge, who chaired the Foreign Relations Committee, wanted Congress to decide when American forces could be committed abroad; Wilson would not bend, and the treaty was never ratified.

To avert a nationwide strike in 1916, Wilson signed the Adamson Act, giving an eight-hour day to whom?

Railroad workers had threatened to stop the nation's trains, and when the railroads took the new law to court, the Supreme Court upheld it in 1917.

From the White House in 1913, Wilson set off the blast that destroyed a dike and completed which waterway?

The Panama Canal's last barrier, the Gamboa Dike, was blown by a telegraph signal from Washington, letting water into the final cut and joining the two oceans.

After Wilson's 1919 stroke, who screened his papers and visitors in a self-described 'stewardship'?

His wife, Edith, chose which matters reached the president's bedside, and insisted afterwards that she never made a decision herself and that his doctors had urged the role on her.

Wilson vetoed which 1919 law designed to enforce Prohibition, only for Congress to override him?

The Volstead Act became law almost at once: the House overrode Wilson's veto the same day he issued it, and the Senate followed the next day.

Which of Wilson's attorneys general launched the 1919-20 raids on radicals that bear his name?

A. Mitchell Palmer had been a target himself: in June 1919 an anarchist's bomb went off outside his Washington home, and he put a young J. Edgar Hoover to work on the round-ups.

Which Republican won the 1920 landslide to succeed Wilson, promising a 'return to normalcy'?

Warren G. Harding swept in while Wilson, though gravely ill, had still hoped his own party would nominate him for a third term.

Wilson is the only president whose final resting place is where?

Washington National Cathedral received his body in 1924: Wilson had never left the city, retiring to a house on S Street and trying a law partnership he was too ill to sustain.

Which Texan became Wilson's closest adviser while turning down any Cabinet post?

Colonel Edward House had never been a soldier, his title being honorary, and after years as Wilson's confidant he was frozen out in 1919 when the president felt betrayed at the peace talks.

Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo became what to Wilson after a White House wedding in 1914?

Son-in-law: McAdoo married Wilson's youngest daughter, Eleanor, and later sought the presidency twice himself, losing his party's nomination in 1920 and 1924.

Wilson's portrait is on a US banknote that collectors may not legally own; what is its face value?

$100,000 is the value of the 1934 gold certificate bearing Wilson's face, printed only for official bank-to-bank transfers and never issued to the public.

Which wartime measure did Congress repeal in 1919 over Wilson's veto?

Daylight saving time had been brought in to save fuel during the war, but farmers hated it, and their allies in Congress overrode Wilson's veto to scrap it.

Which campaigners, known as the 'Silent Sentinels', picketed Wilson's White House gates from January 1917?

Suffragists were jailed for it, some going on hunger strike and being force-fed, and in 1918 Wilson urged the Senate to pass their amendment as a war measure.

As a boy in Georgia in 1865, Wilson watched which captured Confederate leader brought through town under Union guard?

Jefferson Davis, watched by the eight-year-old Wilson in Augusta, went on to two years in a fortress prison and was freed without ever standing trial.

Where did Wilson teach from 1885 to 1888, at a newly established women's college?

Bryn Mawr had only just opened, and by one historian's account Wilson felt overworked, underpaid and unenthusiastic about teaching women, so he left after three years.

Wilson's 1913 tariff cuts were paid for by introducing which kind of federal tax?

An income tax had been struck down by the Supreme Court in the 1890s, so it took the Sixteenth Amendment, ratified weeks before Wilson took office, to make this one legal.

Which territory did Wilson buy by treaty from Denmark in 1916?

The Virgin Islands cost $25 million in gold: Wilson's government feared Germany would overrun Denmark and turn the islands into a naval base, and hinted it might occupy them if Copenhagen refused to sell.

The Jones Act of 1916 committed the United States to the eventual independence of which territory?

The Philippines gained its first fully elected legislature under the act, though independence was promised only 'as soon as a stable government can be established', with Washington as the judge.

Which sport did Wilson play regularly as president, on his doctors' advice?

Golf: Wilson stuck with it for the exercise even though he thought it a silly game and made fun of it.

Which modern American holiday grew out of the Armistice Day that Wilson first proclaimed in 1919?

Veterans Day kept the date, November 11, but Congress renamed it in 1954 so that it honoured those who served in every war, not only Wilson's.