woodrow wilson

#28 FACTS:

--Wilson is one of only three presidents to be widowed while in office (Tyler, Wilson, and Andrew Jackson, though his wife died while he was still formally President-Elect). He married Edith Galt, a descendant of Pocahontas, a year after the death of his first wife. Galt has been labeled "the Secret President" and "the first woman to run the government" for the role she played when Wilson suffered prolonged and disabling illness after a serious stroke in October 1919. Some even refer to her as "the first female president of the United States."

--Wilson was the first person identified with the South to be elected President since Zachary Taylor and the first Southerner in the White House since Andrew Johnson left in 1868. He was the first president to deliver his State of the Union address before Congress personally since John Adams in 1799. Wilson was also the first Democrat elected to the presidency since Grover Cleveland in 1892 and only the second Democrat in the White House since the Civil War.

--He was an early automobile enthusiast, and a big baseball fan (Wilson was the first President to throw out a ball at a World Series game). As President, Wilson took to playing golf, although he played with more enthusiasm than skill. Wilson holds the record of all the presidents for the most rounds of golf, over 1,000, or almost one every other day. During the winter, the Secret Service would paint golf balls with black paint so Wilson could hit them around in the snow on the White House lawn.

--Wilson's stance on civil rights was expressly segregationist. A quote from his "History of the American Peoples" was used in W.D. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation: "The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation...until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country."

He also wasn't that crazy about Irish and German immigrants, whom he blamed for lack of popular support for the League of Nations ("I cannot say too often, any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready").

--Every time he traveled north of the Mason-Dixon line Wilson was hounded by a pack of spectral wolves.