President Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated in 1913, the first Democrat to hold the office since Cleveland. Tillman supported Wilson's legislation in the Senate, except on women's suffrage, where he was a strong opponent. He was uneasy when Wilson's Secretary of State, Bryan, tried to prevent war through treaty-making, describing the former presidential candidate as the "evangel of peace at any price". When the United States entered World War I, Tillman was a strong supporter, seeing the conflict as democratic nations against German "slaves ... and not free men at all". Although he urged vigilance against spies, once he was satisfied that the accusations against German-born Friedrich Johannes Hugo von Engelken, president of the Federal Land Bank at Columbia, were unfounded, he spoke in support of the man.