The National State of Affairs: 1916

Palm Beach County's Court House was completed in 1916. This information will provide the larger picture of what was occurring on a national scale in the U.S. at the time.

President Woodrow Wilson, the former governor of New Jersey, was running for reelection as a Democrat. Elected in 1912 in a three-way race between incumbent Republican William H. Taft and Progressive Party Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, who was born in Virginia and raised throughout the South, was the first southern president since Andrew Jackson.

Wilson was also the most educated president having graduated from Princeton and receiving a Ph. D. in political science at Johns Hopkins University. He taught at Bryn Mawr and Wesleyan University prior to becoming president of Princeton in 1902. Ironically, President Wilson won his reelection with the slogan, “He kept us out of war.” World events changed the national mood by April 1917 when the U.S. declared war on Germany and the country entered into its first world war, dubbed “The War to End All Wars.”

Aside from international events, domestic matters were not all that settled in the U.S. In 1916, General John J. Pershing pursued Pancho Villa back into Mexico after a cross-border raid by the Mexican rebel into New Mexico. In domestic politics, expansionism still enjoyed national momentum. The U.S. acquired the Virgin Islands from Denmark for $25 million.

Also on the domestic scene, the complexion of politics began to change. The first woman to be elected to Congress was Jeannette Rankin of Montana - - and this was four years before the 19th Amendment to the Constitution gave women the right to vote in 1920. Women's rights also made progress on other domestic issues; in 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, N.Y.

While the telephone had been invented decades earlier in 1876, it was not yet in vogue to have that instrument sitting on a person's desk. The first telephone in the White House was installed in a booth outside President Wilson's office.