Woodrow Wilson’s Legacy Is Loaded With Good and Bad, But His Work to Even the Economic Playing Field Is Often Overlooked

Jones Imagine American democracy as a mountain lake, its waters held back by an earthen dam of legal, constitutional and cultural restraints. Periodically, the dam’s sluiceways become clogged by entrenched interests, concentrated wealth or fear of the unfamiliar. At such moments, we welcome an Andrew Jackson or a Theodore Roosevelt, those improbable champions of the working man, to clear the spillways of our democratic experiment, strengthening the dam and the lake it makes possible.

Woodrow Wilson’s March 1913 inauguration heralded just such a repair job. That spring, he became the first president in more than a century to address Congress in person. The next day, he returned. Operating out of the President’s Room in the Capitol, he successfully lobbied members to enact the most significant tariff reductions since the Civil War. This was the opening move in Wilson’s campaign to level the economic playing field by strengthening competition against the forces of monopoly.

A minister’s son reared in the South during and after the Civil War, Wilson may have had dyslexia, and his temperament was judged too remote for mass appeal. (He remains the only American president to earn a PhD.) Deploying persuasive talents honed as an academic instructor and administrator, his first-term legislative record reflects the progressive agenda at flood tide. Wilson created the Federal Reserve to reclaim for Washington the fiscal initiative that had been assumed by Wall Street. Consumers as well as small businesses benefited from his establishment of the Federal Trade Commission. Labor unions gained new protections via the Clayton Antitrust Act.