Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), twenty-eighth president of the United States, led the country into World War I and was a primary architect of the League of Nations.

Woodrow Wilson was born in Staunton, Va., on Dec. 28, 1856. His father, a Presbyterian minister, communicated his moral austerity to his son, resulting in an inflexibility that sometimes revealed itself. Wilson attended Davison University in North Carolina for a brief time but graduated from Princeton in 1879. In his senior year he published an important essay in the International Review, revealing his early interest in American government. He studied law briefly and, though he did not complete the course, practiced for a time in Atlanta, Ga., without much success. He pursued graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University, receiving his doctorate in 1886.

In his doctoral thesis Wilson analyzed the American political system, pointing to the fracturing of power that flowed from the committee system...