Advent of a Public Statesman, 1906–10

Abstract

At the peak of his campaign for the presidency in 1912, Wilson said he regretted not having entered politics earlier, at the point when the progressive spirit was just beginning to awaken the nation.1 That thought reflected his latent interest in a political career. As a college student, he would jest with friends about meeting them someday in the Senate where they could continue their debates, and as a young man he spoke of his “first-primary-ambition” being to take an “active, if possible a leading, part in public life.”2 Upon witnessing a session of Congress in 1898, he told his wife, “The old longing for public life comes on me in a flood.”3 A few years later, he confided to a friend, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, “I was forty-five three weeks ago, and between forty-five and fifty-five, I take it, is when a man ought to do the work into which he expects to put the most of himself…. I was born to be a politician and must be at the task for which, by means of my historical writing, I have all these years been in training.”KeywordsDemocratic PartyPublic LifePublic AffairPresidential CandidateAmerican NewspaperThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.