DISILLUSIONMENT WITH TAFT resulted in a split in the Republican Party and the creation of a new Progressive Party that rallied around Theodore Roosevelt. In the election of 1912, four candidates styled themselves “progressives,” but it was Democrat Woodrow Wilson who, with a minority of the popular vote, won the presidency.

Born in Virginia and raised in Georgia, Woodrow Wilson became the first southerner elected president since 1844 and only the second Democrat to occupy the White House since Reconstruction. A believer in states’ rights, Wilson nevertheless promised legislation to break the hold of the trusts. This lean, ascetic scholar was, as one biographer conceded, a man whose “political convictions were never as fixed as his ambition.” Building on the base built by Roosevelt in strengthening presidential power, Wilson exerted leadership to achieve banking reform and worked through his party in Congress to accomplish the Democratic agenda. Before he was finished, Wilson presided over progressivism at high tide and lent his support to many of the Progressive Party’s social reforms.