The Hater’s Guide to Woodrow Wilsonhttps://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/the-haters-guide-to-woodrow-wilson/I come now not to explain Wilson, but to hate him. A national consensus on hating Wilson is long overdue. It is the patriotic duty of every decent American. While conservatives have particular reasons to detest Wilson, and all his works, and all his empty promises, there is more than enough in his record for moderates, liberals, progressives, libertarians, and socialists to join us in this great and unifying cause.
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. ...
Nah. Wilson was a human pile of flaming trash. He was a bad man who made the country and the world worse. His name should be an obscenity, his image an effigy. Hating him is a wholesome obligation of citizenship.
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. ... 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.
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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.” Before entering politics, Wilson had campaigned for the nation’s first such law, in Indiana in 1907. ...
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The Living Constitution and the Administrative State
Wilson didn’t initiate a revolution in just the culture of his party, but also in its approach to the Constitution and the structure of American government. As I have detailed at length before, Wilson was not just the father of the theory of the “living Constitution,” malleable rather than fixed in writing, that “is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton.” He was also the great champion of the administrative state. He notoriously referred to public opinion as “a clumsy nuisance, a rustic handling delicate machinery.” These were ideas that he drew from a mixture of the wartime Confederacy and German academia, and they continue to plague us today, drawing the power of constitution-making and lawmaking away from the people and their elected legislatures.
Wilson made the Dem Party the party of academic elitists.
