Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements

Now, at last the Democrats had full control of both Legislature and Executive, and the country expected them to do something: unreasonably, it was at the same time rather afraid that they would do something. To do something but not too much, to meet the popular demands without destroying the economic well-being which the Republican ascendency had undoubtedly promoted, to insure a better distribution of wealth without crippling the production of wealth--this was the problem of a President who had had only two years in public life, and most of whose assistants would have to be chosen from men almost without executive experience.

The chief peculiarity of President Wilson's political position lay in a theory of American Government which had first come to him in his undergraduate days at Princeton and which had been steadily developing ever since. That theory, briefly, was that the American Constitution permitted, and the practical development of American politics should have compelled, the President t