Wilson Administrations - Wilson and Congress

Wilson and Congress

Wilson held office during the Sixty-third, Sixty-fourth, Sixty-fifth, and Sixty-sixth Congresses. Probably no other president saw his relations with Congress deteriorate so much during his time in office, from near dominance at the start to icy and virtually total estrangement at the end. Democrats had won control of the House of Representatives in 1910, and in 1912 the Democrats added control of the Senate as well as the White House. The stage was thus set for the passage of one of the most ambitious domestic agendas of any president since Abraham Lincoln.

Wilson quickly established himself as the leader of his party and the nation, by actively working to direct the activities of Congress in a way few presidents before him had managed. Hendrick A. Clements, in his important study The Presidency of Woodrow Wilson, noted that there is no great secret to Wilson's early success with the Congress. "He...

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