Americal Thinker

It's encouraging to see his presidency lose its reputation as quickly as it has, but unfortunately, many historical rankings still have him in the top 15 of all-time presidents. A century has gone by, but it's past time for a national repudiation of the Wilson presidency.

    Woodrow Wilson was born in Virginia in 1856 and is well known as the only President with a doctorate. However, he actually held only an honorary law doctorate. He was a law school dropout who eventually earned a Ph.D. in political science. For that, he wrote his doctoral dissertation as a book with only 52 citations, which helped him rise to become the president of Princeton University.

    His tenure at Princeton revealed his un-American, racist roots originating from his formative years during the height of the Confederacy. Like his vile, anti-black published books, Wilson committed to keeping the university segregated, which was unlike other Ivy League schools at the time. Sadly, an African American would not graduate from Princeton until nearly a quarter-century after Wilson’s death.

    Consequently, Woodrow Wilson used his sparse academic achievements to enter politics, and it was for the worse. As governor of New Jersey, he endorsed eugenics and signed a bill into law that sterilized "the hopelessly defective and criminal classes”. Wilson had campaigned for Indiana's law in 1907, which became the first such legislation in the country.

    Unfortunately, after two years as governor, Woodrow Wilson would become the Democratic Party's presidential nominee and win the 1912 election in a three-way race against the incumbent President William Howard Taft and former President Teddy Roosevelt. Wilson prevailed with a lowly 42% of the vote, which is a plurality, not a majority, and making him the first President from the South since Andrew Johnson.

    As the 28th President, Wilson standardized racism in the federal government by segregating the civil service in 1913. He fired 15 of 17 black supervisors appointed to federal jobs; meanwhile, the Treasury and Postmaster General segregated their departments.

    Furthermore, Christopher Cox's biography Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn, presents a clear portrayal of the President's dangerous progressivism. President Wilson was the first American head of state to do away with the vision of government the framers intended. He believed that Americans should move “beyond the Declaration of Independence.”

    His vision of government was that the Executive Branch needed greater centralized power and that the Madisonian framework of checks and balances was outdated for modern society. He popularized the theory of the ‘living Constitution’ that many Democrats believe today. The government is a living organism, said Wilson, and “no living thing can have its organs offset against each other as checks, and live.”

    It’s important to note that Wilson believed that God had anointed him to be President, and, to be sure, he acted on it. His major economic achievement during his first year in office was signing the federal income tax into law. He also created the Federal Reserve, which helped trigger the Great Depression and played a major role in the 2008 economic recession, not to mention the ratification of the 17th Amendment, which replaced the appointment of U.S. senators by state legislatures with direct elections, which was a huge blow to federalism.

    Without a doubt, his most consequential blunder was the United States’ entry into World War I. Wilson won re-election in 1916 with the campaign slogan "He kept us out of war." Well, three months into his second term, he declared war on Germany. The President sold the war under the guise of “making the world safe for democracy.” It did no such thing.

    Conventional wisdom holds that if the U.S. had stayed out of the war, more likely than not, the other countries would have brokered a peace deal. Because Wilson wanted America to lead the postwar negotiations, he decided the best way was for the U.S. troops to join in the offensive. What America got in return was a massive loss of life. The war ended with 320,000 wounded and 116,000 American soldiers dead.

In addition, it was the prerequisite for World War II. Germany became a failed state and turned to Nazism. The Bolsheviks in Russia overthrew the tsarist government and turned to communism after the new socialist government collapsed, because Wilson bribed the Kerensky government to stay in the war. As Vladimir Lenin would later say, “Our revolution was born of the war."

    A unconstitutional assault on civil liberties accompanied the descent into war. The Wilson Administration created the Committee on Public Information. The goal of this government agency was to indoctrinate American citizens to support the war effort. It was composed of over 150,000 employees to promote government propaganda and to administer censorship of opposing political opinions, similar to the Biden Administration's campaign to monitor what it determined to be misinformation on social media.

    The term “fascism” is thrown around a lot in our political discourse, but Woodrow Wilson fits the bill. He used the 1916 Army Appropriations Act to take over private property and nationalize the railroad and energy sectors.

    The Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 followed, authorizing the monitoring of public expression and leading to the imprisonment of thousands for publicly opposing the war. Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs was given a ten-year prison sentence and had his citizenship revoked for speaking out against the Espionage Act. More people were imprisoned as political dissidents under President Wilson than under Benito Mussolini in the 1920s.

    Another Wilson failure was the Treaty of Versailles, which officially ended WW I. The problem is that it assigned blame and war payments to Germany. The League of Nations, which preceded the United Nations, represented Wilson's idea of a world government. The United States never joined, and it became an abject failure, but give him credit for creating the blueprint for sovereign states to conform to a globalist order.

    It’s fitting that Wilson’s presidency ended in a depression, only for America to bounce back under the conservative presidencies of Harding and Coolidge. In many respects, Woodrow Wilson is the godfather of the modern Democratic Party. He made progressivism the party's central tenet nationally and paved the way for statist presidents in Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Barack Obama. While scholars still debate Woodrow Wilson, let the record show that he was a bad man and an even worse president for the country.

Image: Public Domain

    This essay has been edited since publication to clarify Wilson's academic history.