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
LOL!
It may sound silly, but I honestly believe Bubba to be ten thousand times worse than the worst of the worst.
A future historian might possibly say the same thing about George Herbert Walker Bush in 80 years. The legacy of clinton is yet to be finally written in blood, much of it probably American.
1. Why don't these facts appear in the mainstream textbooks, even as an "Alternate Point of View";
2. And why is it that a bunch of conservative Internet renegades (some Canadian) seem to be the only ones bringing these things up?
Maybe because they're not really as "factual" as this author would have us believe? Not that Wilson was any great shakes -- his mistakes are well documented -- but this "analysis" is far too simplistic.
The article is also misinformed: Japan was not a "one of the major allied powers." They sent a very modest number of troops to Europe, a few ships to the Mediterranean, and harassed the Germans in China.
Why would the author make such a claim? Apparently to lay the blame for Pearl Harbor at Wilson's feet -- a rather arrogant assumption that excludes Japanese imperialism. (Unless the author would like to blame Japan's invasion of China on Wilson, too....)
Like Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, "hard Wilsonians" want to use American might to promote American ideals.Your argument was that since Boot said that Wolfowitz and Cheney support a 'hard Wilsonian' view of projecting American influence, this is evidence that the Neocons look at Wilson as a hero.
I have challenged you to provide any evidence that Reagan considered Wilson a hero; obviously if the argument you posited works for 'hard Wilsonians' Cheney and Wolfowitz, it works for 'hard Wilsonians' like Ronald Reagan.
I suppose it would also work for a 'hard Wilsonian' like Theodore Roosevelt too-- although that is somewhat hard to fathom, being that 1) Roosevelt preceded Wilson, and 2) Roosevelt ran against Wilson (although admittedly in doing he enabled Wilson to be elected).
There are neoconservatives, no doubt. They are a small percentage. Some seem to want to make the term meaningless by applying it to anyone they want to put on the defensive-- and in so doing they end up defining 'neoconservative' to include 99% of all conservatives. They just hope no one notices.
I've noticed.
Bullsh!t. It's likely that we'd have ended up in WWI regardless of who won in 1916. And it's also likely that American post-war foreign policy wouldn't have been too much different from what it turned out to be (i.e., isolationist).
And of course, there's the fallacious reasoning that only American influences led to the rise of Nazism, Fascism, Communism, and Japanese Imperialism, and the second World War that resulted from these expansionist regimes.
There is no evidence that Cheney admires Wilson. No evidence Reagan admired Wilson. No evidence Wolfowitz admired Wilson.
Even if one says that they share the same aggressive pursuit of American interests abroad that Wilson did, it does not show any support by them of Wilson. I am sure Hitler loved his mother at one time, and I am equally sure this does not mean that anyone who loved their mother at one time considers Hitler a hero. Similarly, even if one were to share a particular policy view as Wilson it does not mean they consider him a hero. It isn't even evidence in that direction. Reducto ad Wilsionium.
Have a good one.
You say that neocons consider Wilson a hero.
You are challenged to provide evidence of this, and come up with an article by Max Boot, who you call a self-described neocon.
The article you provide features Boot saying there is no neo in his conservatism.
The evidence that neocons consider Wilson a hero that you quote is Boot suggesting that Cheney and Wolfowitz advocate a type of 'hard Wilsonian' foreign policy. In your eyes, this is evidence that the neocons love Wilson.
But Boot continues to say that other advocates of a 'hard Wilsonian' approach are Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt.
So Boot's assertion is proof that Cheney, Wolfowitz and 'neocons' love Wilson, in your eyes, but Boot's assertion that Reagan is also in this category merits a reply of "The onus is on Max Boot to make the connection between RR and Woodrow Wilson, not me."
Fair enough. But the onus is on him to make a connection between the neocons and Wilson too then. In other words, you just disavowed your own proof.
As for me, I have never accepted most of Kirk's isolationism. I also have never considered Kirk's isolationism to be his defining characteristic. Nor do I consider conservatism to be homogeneous. I think that if you put Adams, Burke, Calhoun, Toqueville and others who Kirk touched upon in "The Conservative Mind" together, you would find considerable agreement and considerable disagreement. Reagan and Goldwater diverged greatly. Some so-called conservatives would go apoplectic at much of Goldwater's acceptance speech, where he talked about creating free trade zones for all of North America.
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