Posted on 08/11/2003 7:17:06 AM PDT by danielmryan
I have written in the past about the possible benefits of men like Douglas MacArthur being elected President, Dick Cheney being made Chief Justice or Bill Simon winning the California Governorship. These describe the theme of latent greatness in good Americans.
But what lies at the opposite end of goodness? Who was the very worst American president? Woodrow Wilson, perhaps the first true "liberal" of modern American politics, was a president so awful for America and for the world that it is worthwhile to recount as a cautionary tale some of his larger failures.
Begin with his election in 1912. Wilson received barely forty percent of the popular vote, with the two Republicans (T.R., of course, as a Bull Moose) collecting sixty percent of the vote. But that understates Wilson's utter lack of any mandate. The vote that Wilson received came largely from the South, where blacks could not vote and where Republicans were a threatened group.
How much of a one party state was the South then? Consider that while Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 was receiving almost sixty percent of the national vote, in some states of the South T.R. received less than ten percent of the vote, even less than five percent of the vote.
Wilson almost immediately began undoing the good work of past Republican administrations on black civil rights. The Leftist notion that Republicans once supported black civil rights and then stopped is just patently false: Republicans, if anything, were more solicitous of black rights in the period from 1876 to 1920 than they had been before then.
Blacks could, and did, serve as delegates to the Republican National Convention, as federal officers appointed by Republican presidents, and even as Republican congressmen. Only when the Democrats reacquired the White House in 1912, did the gradual progress of blacks stop. And only the slavish dedication of black leaders to the Democrat Party today can mask the plain facts that Wilson and Truman were bigots of the very worst sort.
Woodrow adored The Birth of a Nation, which presents the Ku Klux Klan as a necessary post-Reconstruction force. He urged blacks to return to the cotton fields. He re-segregated the civil service. W.E.B. Dubois had broken ranks with other blacks to support a Democrat, rather than a Republican, in 1912. Dubois soon regretted his decision. Wilson reneged on his promise to create a national race commission (something that his Republican successor, the ever maligned Warren Harding, would do.)
Wilson's bigotry was not confined to blacks. He also loathed Orientals. His two Republican predecessors had carefully intervened to prevent anti-Japanese legislation from being enacted in West Coast states. They urged, quite properly, that slapping Japan - a growing industrial power that sought friendly relations with America - was a national security question.
Woodrow, however, made no such effort. As a consequence, the combination of strength and fairness which Theodore Roosevelt had used to improve relations with Japan, which was complemented by Taft - who was quite familiar with the Orient - was all squandered by Wilson.
Even after the horror of the Great War - when all decent people were grappling with ways to prevent another war - Wilson was destroying the possibility of bringing Japan into the company of western nations, a principal factor in the Second World War.
Japan in 1919 proposed to insert a quite reasonable clause inserted into the covenant of the League of Nations supporting the principle of racial equality. Alternatives to the proposed clause were rejected as unsatisfactory by the Japanese. Japan, like America, had been one of the major allied powers.
They forced a vote, and President Wilson, chairman of the League of Nations Commission, again attempted to avoid a vote. When it passed by a vote of eleven to six, Wilson claimed that the amendment had failed since the vote was not unanimous.
Wilson also appointed as Secretary of State that paragon of virtue, the virulently racist and anti-Semitic perennial Democrat nominee, William Jennings Bryan. His famous (or infamous) "Cross of Gold" speech referred to the same "New York Jews" that seem to have so troubled Harry Truman.
Wilson ran for reelection in 1916, campaigning on the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War." After he won and after he took his oath of office the second time, Wilson asked Congress to declare war on the Central Powers. In retrospect, we see Imperial Germany as a bad nation like Nazi Germany.
But in the Great War, there was no moral high ground. If ever there was a war in which America needed to remain neutral, and use its wealth and good offices to provide a lasting peace, this was the war. By entering the war, however, Wilson insured that Germans would view America as hostile to Germany.
As a consequence, the ghastly Treaty of Versailles caused quiet rage in Germany, deep cynicism in Italy, indifference in Communist Russia, apathy in France, and alienation in Japan. The three horrid totalitarianism systems of the Twentieth Century - Fascism, Communism, and National Socialism - each were helped mightily by Wilson's arrogance and ignorance.
Wilson, who deemed himself indispensable to mankind, concealed his mental incapacity just when the future of the human race was being hammered out in the salons of Europe. He failed, utterly completely and totally. Even honorable progressives, like LaGuardia, had almost unbridled contempt for Woodrow Wilson.
Charles Evans Hughes, who would later serve as one of the best Chief Justices in American history, almost won the 1916 election. Indeed, if blacks in the South had been allowed to vote, Hughes would have won a landslide in the popular vote. Had Hughes won, a hundred million or so lives would have been saved.
What can be said about Wilson? One of the least damaging parts of his awful eight years happened at the very beginning, when the Sixteenth Amendment was adopted, allowing a federal income tax.
Bruce Walker is a senior writer with Enter Stage Right. He is also a frequent contributor to The Pragmatist and The Common Conservative.
Enter Stage Right -- http://www.enterstageright.com
As far as the cover-ups are concerned, the only opinion I can advance is that professional intellectuals, despite the political positions they undertake, always have a Toryish streak to them. (To be fair, the standards of their trade contain a bias towards Toryishness.)
Wilson also appointed as Secretary of State that paragon of virtue, the virulently racist and anti-Semitic perennial Democrat nominee, William Jennings Bryan. His famous (or infamous) "Cross of Gold" speech referred to the same "New York Jews" that seem to have so troubled Harry Truman.Bryan was a wuss. My namesake even beat his butt without leaving his own patio.
Talk about oxymorons.
It looks like Slick Willie will be the third voted off.
so he is a bit of hero in some part of the RightProvide some evidence to support this assertion.
Each week, a randomly selected group of five is presented. One goes.
LBJ happened to be in the first group of five.
Is that supposed to be sarcasm?
I presume that the author is being sarcastic - the income tax was the beginning of the Imperial Federal Government. And the 17th Amendment, also enacted during the Wilson years (which changed the way U.S. Senators assumed power from being appointed by state legislatures to a popular election), was the last nail in the coffin for state's rights.
But probably the biggest blows to liberty during the Wilson Administration were the first successful movements to enact national prohibition laws: the Harrison Narcotics Act, passed in 1914, and growing power of the so-called temperance movement which led to the 18th (Prohibition) Amendment which was passed the year after Wilson left office. The fallout from these doomed attempts to defy human nature started the greatest crime wave in American history in the 1920's, and contributed to the destruction of the American inner cities and the corruption of several generations of minority youth.
Yes, the author is correct: Wilson was the Very Worst President of the United States - even worse than Clinton.
I have been called many names in my career--few of them printable--but the most mystifying has to be "neocon."... The neocons, in the famous formulation of one of their leaders, Irving Kristol, were "liberals mugged by reality." Well, I haven't been mugged lately. I haven't even been accosted. I like to think I've been in touch with reality from day one, since I've never been a Trotskyite, a Maoist or even a Democrat. There's no "neo" in my conservatism. I don't deserve much credit for this, I might add, since I grew up in the 1980s, when conservatism was cool. Many of the original neocons, by contrast, grew up in the days when Republicans were derided as "the stupid party.""Quite ironic, really, in that the ones running around calling Republicans 'the stupid party' nowadays tend to be the same ones railing about some 'neoconservative' movement. But I digress. So Max Boot is not a 'neoconservative' as you stated.
But your point that some on the right look to Wilson as some sort of hero is not supported by the article either.
"Advocates of this view embrace Woodrow Wilson's championing of American ideals but reject his reliance on international organizations and treaties to accomplish our objectives. ("Soft Wilsonians," a k a liberals, place their reliance, in Charles Krauthammer's trenchant phrase, on paper, not power.) Like Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, "hard Wilsonians" want to use American might to promote American ideals.This is akin to reducto ad Hitlerum- that agreeing with Hitler on anything makes one a Nazi. Call it reducto ad Wilsonium.
It's silly calling it Wilsonian anyway, since projecting American interests internationally was the policy under Presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.
Your argument basically says that Reagan considered Wilson a hero, by the way. Surely you can find some quotation by Ronald Maximus to support your contention. There is no dearth of material by Reagan on the net. Go to town!
I blame the 17th amendment for Clinton's impeachment acquital.
I happen to agree with the author of this piece that Wilson was one of our very worst presidents. My reasons are many and varied, from his foreign policy (not really neutral in WWI from the beginning) to his propaganda campaign during WWI, the 1919 Red Scare excesses against civil liberties, his championship of the income tax, the Federal reserve, and, of course, the extreme Southern bigotry of his views, although as one descended from Southerners I hardly take a pro-Radical Reconstruction view of the period.
Curiously, my dislike of Wilson was actually formed reading the major ostensibly favorable multivolume biography by Leuchtenberg. One of the best short takes on Wilson is a little known (today) book by Sigmund Freud and Thomas Bullit titled Thomas Woodrow Wilson, in which the father of psychoanaltic frummery describes the psyche of "Little Tommy Wilson". It really is a must read for conservatives.
A couple of notes on the article: Wilson did appoint William Jennings Bryan as secretary of state, but the two never got along: Wilson was a psuedo-aristocrat, former president of Princeton, and Bryan a populist, though by no means a stupid or uneducated man. I mentioned above that Wilson was not really neutral during WWI, conspiring essentially with Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, (through is emmissary, Col. House, who pretty much described the whole thing in his memoirs) to tilt American 'neutrality' against the Central Powers and towards the Brits. Bryan, an honest patriot even if a fundamentalist mountebank in many respects, was appalled and, in what I have elsewhere described as the one principled act of his entire life, resigned as secretary of state in 1915 over the matter.
Wilson was also heavily under the influence of his wife, who was practically running the government after his stroke. Wilson's insistance that the US Senate accept the League of Nations "as is" ensured its rejection and failure.
Moreover, Wilson's whole vision of the post WWI world, the Fourteen Points, and the entire performance of the American delegation at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, which resulted in the infamous Treaty of Versailles, has been heavily critiziced by diplomatic historians. The classic which everyone should read on this is Peacemaking 1919 by Sir Harold Nicholson, who was a member of the British delegation. Wilson's lack of preparation was astonishing, and was a major factor in the disaster that ensued. I don't know if the book is still read, but when I was a graduate student in European history, it was one of those books you had to know, rather like Fritz Fischer's Germany's Aims in the First World War (Griff nach der Weltmacht in German)
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