The man many considered an aloof intellectual explained to Congress that the president of the United States is simply “a human being trying to cooperate with other human beings in a common service.” His presence alone, to say nothing of his eloquent appeal, affixed overwhelming importance to tariff reform. In less than 10 minutes, Wilson articulated his argument and left the Capitol.

The next day, Wilson did something even more stunning: he returned. On the second floor of the Capitol — in the North Wing, steps from the Senate chamber — is the most ornate room within an already grand edifice. George Washington had suggested this President’s Room, where he and the Senate could conduct their joint business, but it was not built until the 1850s. Even then, the Italianate salon, with its frescoed ceiling and richly colored tiled floor, was seldom used beyond the third day of March every other year, when Congressional sessions ended and the president arrived to sign 11th-hour legislation. Only during Wilson’s tenure has the President’s Room served the purpose for which it was designed. He frequently worked there three times a week, often with the door open.

Almost every visit Wilson made to the Capitol proved productive. (As president, he appeared before joint sessions of Congress more than two dozen times.) During Wilson’s first term, when the president was blessed with majorities in both the House and the Senate, the policies of the New Freedom led to the creation of the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, the Clayton Antitrust Act, the eight-hour workday, child labor laws and workers’ compensation. Wilson was also able to appoint the first Jew to the Supreme Court, Louis D. Brandeis.

Even when the president became besieged with troubles, both personal and political — the death of his first wife; the outbreak of World War I; an increasingly Republican legislative branch; agonizing depression until he married a widow named Edith Bolling Galt — Wilson hammered away at his progressive program. In 1916, he won re-election because, as his campaign slogan put it, “He kept us out of war!” A month after his second inauguration, he appeared yet again before Congress, this time, however, to convince the nation that “the world must be made safe for democracy.” This credo became the foundation for the next century of American foreign policy: an obligation to assist all peoples in pursuit of freedom and self-determination.

Suddenly, the United States needed to transform itself from an isolationist nation into a war machine, and Wilson persuaded Congress that dozens of crucial issues (including repressive espionage and sedition acts) required that politics be “adjourned.” Wilson returned again and again to the President’s Room, eventually convincing Congress to pass the 19th Amendment: if women could keep the home fires burning amid wartime privation, the president argued, they should be entitled to vote. The journalist Frank I. Cobb called Wilson’s control of Congress “the most impressive triumph of mind over matter known to American politics.”