Woodrow Wilson — 28th President (1913–1921)

**Woodrow Wilson** was the academic who became president — a political science professor and Princeton president who won the White House and enacted sweeping domestic reforms (the Federal Reserve, the FTC, the income tax) before leading America into World War I and then failing to bring America into the League of Nations he helped create. Wilson was brilliant, idealistic, rigid, and ultimately broken — a stroke incapacitated him for his final year in office while his wife and doctor ran the country.