Thomas Woodrow Wilson was an American politician and professor who acted as the United States' 28th president from 1913 to 1921. Wilson was a part of the Democratic Party and held the position of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey before gaining the presidential election in 1912. Wilson modified the country's economic policies as President and took the United States into World War I in 1917. Wilsonianism was named after him, as he was the leading proponent of the League of Nations. Wilsonianism was the term coined to his progressive foreign affairs outlook.

During the Civil War and Reconstruction, Wilson was brought up in the American South, mostly in Augusta, Georgia. Wilson earned a Ph.D. in political science from Johns Hopkins University and went on to teach at several universities before becoming the president of Princeton University and a proponent of higher education reform. Wilson was governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913, and during that time, he defied his party's leaders and pushed through several progressive measures. At the 1912 Democratic National Convention, he rallied liberals and Southerners to his cause to gain the presidential nomination. Wilson comfortably beat Republican incumbent William Howard Taft and third-party contender, Theodore Roosevelt, in the 1912 presidential election, being the first Southerner to accomplish so since 1848.

Wilson allowed the extensive adoption of division inside the federal bureaucracy during his first year in office. His first term was mostly spent on getting his leftist New Freedom domestic legislation passed. The Revenue Act of 1913, which slashed tariffs and established the current income tax, was his first major objective. Wilson also helped to get the Federal Reserve Act passed, which established the Federal Reserve System. To foster economic competition and oppose extreme corporate dominance, two significant laws were enacted: the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act.