SOURCE: "Woodrow Wilson and the Presidency," in Presidential Power and the Constitution, Edited by Richard Loss, Cornell University Press, 1976, pp. 32-53.

In the following essay, which was originally published in the Virginia Law Review {October 1956), Corwin looks to Wilson's various writings for the origins of the changes he brought to the practice of presidential politics. (Note that material inside braces,{ }, represents the editor's, Richard Loss's, commentary.)

When Thomas W. Wilson, Princeton '79, found it essential to select a theme for his senior essay—the institution goes back that far, apparently—he chose "Cabinet Government in the United States." The choice was dictated by two circumstances: first, by the fact that he had been reading, especially in Bagehot's misnamed English Constitution, about the British cabinet system and had come to admire it; secondly, by the scars which as a Southerner he bore vicariously from the enormities of Congressional Reconstruction...