A hater’s guide to Woodrow Wilson. Great article you should show your kids

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Woodrow Wilson, the worst 2 term president in American history

The roll call of the worst presidents in American history includes some consensus top choices. James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce both contributed mightily to the nation’s slide into the Civil War, and Andrew Johnson did enduring harm to Reconstruction in the war’s aftermath. But all three of those men were repudiated by the end of their single term in office. They left no heirs who would acknowledge their influence, no fleet of academic hagiographers who could see themselves reflected in those presidencies.

Wilson, by contrast, served two full and consequential terms. He was the only Democrat re-elected to the job during the century between 1832 and 1936. He was lionized by liberals and progressives in academia and the media for most of the century after he left office in 1921. In my youth, and perhaps yours, Wilson was presented in history books as a tragic hero whom the unthinking American people didn’t deserve. He was often placed highly on academics’ rankings of the presidents. Princeton University named its school of international relations for him. Even in rescinding that honor in June 2020, the university’s press release declared: “Though scholars disagree about how to assess Wilson’s tenure as president of the United States, many rank him among the nation’s greatest leaders and credit him with visionary ideas that shaped the world for the better.”

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Racism, Segregation, and Eugenics
Probably the broadest ground for modern agreement on the awfulness of Wilson is in his disgracefully racist treatment of African Americans. The only president to grow up in the Confederacy, the Virginian Wilson ordered the resegregation of the entire federal government. He required photographs on job applications to screen out black people. The Army under Wilson was so segregated that some black units fought under French command in the largest battle of the First World War. (Naturally, black men who were banned from being hired for peacetime federal jobs were still subjected to the draft.) When you read about Harry Truman’s courageous desegregation of the Army, remember whose work he was undoing. Wilson screened the pro–Ku Klux Klan film Birth of a Nation at the White House; the film quoted pro-Klan passages from one of Wilson’s books. He backed legislation making interracial marriage a felony in the District of Columbia.

Dylan Matthews of Vox concluded that “Woodrow Wilson was extremely racist — even by the standards of his time”

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As governor of New Jersey, Wilson was also pro-eugenics: He signed into law a bill to forcibly sterilize “the hopelessly defective and criminal classes.”

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Wilson’s presidency gave us the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve.

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The most consequential decision of Wilson’s presidency was launching the United States into the First World War in 1917. Despite the origins of the war in European power politics and the presence at the time of Tsarist Russia as one of the major combatants among the Entente Powers, Wilson pitched the war as an effort to “make the world safe for democracy.”

It didn’t. Even aside from the enduring controversies over how the war was sold to the American people and what its vast mobilization cost in American lives, treasure, civil liberties, and constitutionally limited government, it remains questionable to this day whether the world would have been better off with America staying out of the war. A war that ended with an exhausted stalemate or even a German victory on the Western Front — following the Russian collapse in the east — would not have triggered the collapse of the German state and civil society that gave us Nazism, and might have resulted in a European order better situated to isolate and resist Soviet Communism as well as less susceptible to fascism.

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Wilson oversaw the creation of the first formal American wartime propaganda agency, the Committee on Public Information.

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Wilson signed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. Magazines were banned from the mail for departing from the president’s line on the war. Some critics were jailed, including Eugene V. Debs, who had run for president against Wilson and drew over 900,000 votes in 1912. It is not a coincidence that the Supreme Court’s landmark First Amendment cases trace to the Wilson years: in Schenck v. United States, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes cited the “clear and present danger” of obstructing military recruitment to uphold a conviction under the Espionage Act. As Goldberg notes, “more dissidents were arrested or jailed in a few years under Wilson than under [Benito] Mussolini during the entire 1920s.”

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Wartime regulation by the Wilson administration was shockingly heavy-handed, full of price-fixing and rationing, and caused economic chaos, including runaway inflation. (Fittingly, the only U.S. currency to depict Wilson was the $100,000 bill printed during the Great Depression.) He nationalized the telegraph, telephone, and railroad industries.

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The result of all this was a political catastrophe for Wilson’s party. Republicans gained 16 Senate seats, 87 House seats, and 11 governorships between 1918 and 1920. Harding in 1920 won by the biggest popular-vote margin in American presidential history. The voters couldn’t be rid of Wilson and Wilsonism fast enough.

Since George Washington, we have revered our tradition of presidents returning to civilian life. Wilson is the only president, besides those who died in office, to settle for his entire post-presidential life in D.C. He is buried in the National Cathedral. He simply couldn’t leave the federal government.

Every decent American should hate him.

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