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/* 1909 to 1914 */ better
== 1909 to 1914 ==
A slightly more conservative president succeeded Teddy Roosevelt in office in 1909: William Howard Taft. He lowered tariffs and used executive restraint, more than Roosevelt had. Taft later became the Chief Justice of the United States (the leading Justice on the Supreme Court, ); Taft was the only person to lead one branch of government and then lead another.
Taft would have won reelection in 1912, but Teddy Roosevelt insisted on running for president himself as part of the new Progressive (Bull Moose) Party that he founded. This split the Republican vote in half, and allowed the Democratic candidate, the former governor of New Jersey and president of Princeton University, to win. An intellectual, Woodrow Wilson was a progressive who served as President from 1913 to 1921, though he was too sick to accomplish anything towards the end of his presidency. His goal was to make the world safe for democracy, and to expand democracy to foreign countries. He is also known for starting the Federal Reserve banking system that exists to this day. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which was passed soon after Wilson became president, gave the nation a central banking system for the first time since President Jackson destroyed the Bank of the United States and refused to allow it to be reinstated.
As mentioned above, President Taft slightly decreased tariff rates during his presidency (before Wilson). In 1909, the Paine-Aldrich Tariff reduced tariff rates and then , in 1913, the Underwood Tariff brought a big reduction in duty taxes on imports, the first significant reduction since the Civil War. President Wilson did not like tariffs and felt they caused conflicts with foreign countries. He wanted to replace tariffs with a "graduated" or progressive income tax that hit wealthy (primarily hard-working) people more than poor (primarily lazy) people.
The 16th Amendment, which was ratified in 1913 just as Wilson became president, overruled the Supreme Court's decision of ''Pollack v. Farmers Loan and Trust'', which had declared an income tax to be unconstitutional. The 16th Amendment authorized a national income tax:
:The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census of enumeration.
Two other significant developments occurred just as Wilson was taking the presidency in 1913 were : the establishment of the Dillingham Commission to recommend limits on immigration, especially from eastern and southern Europe, and the ratification of the 17th Amendment, which required the direct election of U.S. Senators by the people rather than by state legislatures as before.
== World War I ==
